RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Enigma Variations isn’t a conventionally linear novel. Though it first appears to contain all the delights of that form — the immersiveness, the shocks of plot — it has too many gaps and intentional omissions. Instead, this book wants to be music in words, giving the reader a cellular sense of how it feels to move through time ... Aciman writes arousal so beautifully you miss it when it’s gone ... Near the end the book’s harmonic intention comes to full flower. Giovanni rings through Maud, Maud through Manfred. It’s not that they’re variations on the same character; they don’t inhabit the same emotional position ... Perhaps the book’s greatest wonder is to suggest we can be wildly different people over the span of a life depending on what we lack ... He writes with the ferocity of a writer who’s finally getting his vision down, and he has to say it, has to get it out. He’s made a magnificent, living thing.\
