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André Aciman at Harvard Bookstore

January 12, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Harvard Book Store welcomes ANDRÉ ACIMAN—author of Out of EgyptCall Me By Your Name, and Harvard Square—for a discussion of his latest novel, Enigma Variations.

About Enigma Variations:

In Enigma Variations, André Aciman, who has been called “the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century” (New York Magazine), charts the life of Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and covetous throughout adulthood as they were in adolescence. As a boy in southern Italy, he develops a crush on his parents’ cabinet maker; on a snowbound campus in New England, his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men. On a tennis court in Central Park, or a sidewalk in early spring New York, his attachments are ungraspable, transient and forever underwritten by raw desire—not for just one person’s body but, inevitably, for someone else’s as well. In mapping the most inscrutable corners of desire, Aciman proves to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist of contemporary literature. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want only to offer what we crave from them.

Praise

“A breathless, sketched rendering of one man’s life in love, Aciman’s novel speaks earnestly not only of longing and lust, but also of more complicated emotions . . . [Aciman] portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly

Details

Date:
January 12, 2017
Time:
7:00 pm
Event Categories:
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Website:
http://www.harvard.com/event/andre_aciman1/

Organizer

Harvard Book Store
Phone:
6176611515
Email:
info@harvard.com
Website:
harvard.com

Venue

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
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Website:
www.harvard.com

Did You Know?

Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.