RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"Aciman’s description of that love is devastatingly, excruciatingly real. He exquisitely puts into language what we know of first love, whether we experience it early in life or later ... André Aciman writes authoritatively about love, the title and theme of his most recent work that appropriately includes \'variations\' in its title, which love inevitably, and almost by definition, encompasses. While each of Elgar’s \'variations on a theme\' is based on an acquaintance, and includes musical references to a particular quirk (such as a stammer), and each variation is labeled with the initials of the friend, Aciman’s variations on the theme of love are all one person’s, no initials necessary. And while Elgar labeled his variations an enigma, perhaps because the theme of the variations is the enigma itself, Aciman’s only point to the paradoxes that exist in both our definition(s) of love, and, of course, in love itself.\
