LGBT Literature: Andre Aciman's "Enigma Variations": The Dangers of First Love

LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.

In Enigma Variations (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2017), Andre Aciman returns to the theme he so effortlessly developed in Call Me By Your Name (FSG, 2007)—which was a pretty straightforward account of seventeen-year-old Elio’s summer romance, a love affair that proved to be indelible, that Elio carried far into the future. However, in Enigma Variations, the theme gets complicated, twisty, debilitating.

The reader listens to the voice and interior monologues of Paolo (Paul, Pauly) throughout the novel, while the other characters are illuminated through dialogues and letters and e-mail. In the opening episode entitled “First Love,” Paul—twenty-two and recently graduated from college—is on his way to the summer house where he lived until the age of twelve, ostensibly to let his father know what might be left to the house that had burned down.

“I’ve come back for him.”

These are the words I wrote down in my notebook when I finally saw San Giustiano from the deck of the ferryboat. Just for him. Not for our house, or the island, or my father, or for the view of the mainland when I used to sit alone in the abandoned Norman chapel in the last weeks of our last summer here wondering why I was the unhappiest person on earth.

The “him” is one Nanni (Giovanni), a cabinetmaker in his late twenties, the man Paolo fell in love with at the age of twelve. Although it was unrequited, Paolo had wished otherwise. The seventy-two-page description of this coming-of-age story could easily stand alone as a perfect novella. Aciman’s beautiful rendering of an adolescent’s highs and lows, his vulnerability to the sights, sounds, smells that thrill Paolo, and the confusion when Nanni puts him at arm’s length, all send Paolo to the Norman chapel where he contemplates, imagines, fantasizes about Nanni.

Paul questions the villagers about Nanni’s whereabouts, but no one seems to know what happened to him, until he visits the old tutor who helped him with Latin and Greek. The tutor seems to think he heard something about Nanni emigrating to Canada, and Paul remembers that was a suggestion his father had made when Nanni was working on the family’s heirloom desk. Paul remembers that scene and the familiar banter between his father and Nanni. As he takes a leap of imagination, his memory lights upon several instances when his father mentioned what a great swimmer Nanni was since they both went for early morning swims. Paul realizes that they were probably lovers, and this is confirmed later in the story. Paul is not unhappy about this, but actually happy for them, and adds that he has found a new heritage about his own life: Like father, like son.

The story switches to Paul’s later life as a young intellectual working for a publishing firm in Manhattan, and living with his girlfriend, Maud. He suspects that Maud is having an affair with another man, based on flimsy evidence. Paul thinks he is devastated, but then realizes that no, he is hurt. Maud was not having an affair, and when she feels him pulling away from her, she helps Paul admit the part of him that he thinks no one sees. All the while he was living with Maud, he was lusting after his morning tennis partner, Manfred, and Paul’s erotic fantasies begin to consume his waking thoughts and dreams.

Sometimes you’ll stand naked by the long urinal next to me, unaware that I’m trying my best not to look.  I never look, don’t want to look, don’t want to be caught looking, don’t even want you to know I’m struggling not to look, though I can hear your stream and, for a brief moment, if only I had the courage, am tempted to slip a bare foot in its way to know the warmth from your body.

At this point the reader is still rooting for Paul to become whole, to shake from the tree the deceptive nature of his relationships with people. But the twists and turns keep coming and Paul never really seems to understand what that “first Love” has done, and what it might take to undo some of the debilitating effects.

You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. . .In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the others are a touch deliberate.

Aciman fills Paul’s journey with hyper-regret as he tries to find some sort of footing between self-effacement and the courage to act. Unfortunately, Paul relies on others to see him for who he is without giving them enough information about who he really is. Aciman’s skill at allowing the reader to inhabit Paul’s mind, to make it all believable and sympathetic carries the novel only so far. In spite of Aciman’s beautiful sentences (and it’s always a pleasure to be in the company of such a wordsmith), in spite of the amusing, erotic, arousing interior scenes, I became a bit bored with Paul’s dilemma and thought, “Come on man, step up and commit, stop with the serial monogamous relationships.” Maud, Manfred, Chloe, Claire—have they really all been a touch deliberate?

Late in the novel Paul comes close to expressing his dilemma: “In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I’d grown to love two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer either one.”

Although I wanted to love the protagonist throughout the novel, to empathize fully with Paul’s dilemma, Enigma Variations left me with a bittersweet taste, a sadness that Paul could not get outside his self and overcome the feelings of regret that consumed this story to the very end.

The past may or may not be a foreign country.  It may morph or lie still, but its capital is alway Regret. . .Regret is how we look forward to things we lost yet never really had.  Regret is hope without conviction. . .We’re torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. 

From Amazon’s author’s page:

Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman’s family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College.  Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New  York.  He is currently chair of the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center.  He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and Yeshiva University

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