Enigma Variations

A passionate portrait of love’s contradictory power, in five illuminating stories

THE STORY: Nobel Prize-winning author Abel Znorko lives as a recluse on a remote island in the Norwegian Seas. For fifteen years, his one friend and soulmate has been Helen, from whom he has been physically separated for the majority of their affai

Elgar's Variations for Orchestra, commonly known as the 'Enigma' Variations, marked an epoch both in his career, and in the renaissance of English music at the turn of the century. First performed in 1899 under Hans Richter, the work became his passport to national fame and international success. From the first it intrigued listeners to know why it was called 'enigma', and who were the 'friends pictured within', to whom the work is dedicated. Appearing in the centenary year of the work's composition, this book elucidates what is known, and what has been said about the work and the enigma, and directs future listeners to what matters most: the inspired qualities of the music.

Novello presents a choral setting of Edward Elgar's 'Nimrod' from the Enigma Variations for SSAATTBB Choir, as arranged by John Cameron. This single pieces includes, as well as eight vocal lines, a piano score accompaniment for use in rehearsals.

Viewing the contested theme Comparative Law as an 'Enigma', this book explores its fundamental issues as sub-themes, each covered in two variations. After the Overture, the author pulls some strands together in the Intermezzo, uses a free hand in the Cadenza, and asks the reader to draw her own conclusions in the Finale. By this method two fundamentally opposed views are exposed in each Chapter. The what, why and how of comparative law, comparative law and legal education, comparative law and judges, and comparative law and law reform by transposition are explored. The author also examines current debates of comparative law such as law and culture, deconstruction of classifications, mixing systems, limits of comparability, convergence/non-convergence and ius commune novum. By following this two-pronged approach, the book covers many important aspects of comparative law in a refreshing manner not seen in any other work. It is provocative and discursive, bringing together for the reader major developments of comparative law. The book ends by asking 'Where are we going?'.

Authoritative British editions of the 14 Variations, rich with melody and vibrant rhythms, and four of the five stirring "Pomp and Circumstance" Marches — all filled with distinctively British grandeur.

Authoritative British editions of the 14 Variations, rich with melody and vibrant rhythms, and four of the five stirring "Pomp and Circumstance" Marches — all filled with distinctively British grandeur.

From André Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name (now a major motion picture and the winner of the OscarTM for Best Adapted Screenplay) comes “a sensory masterclass, absorbing, intelligent, unforgettable” (Times Literary Supplement). André Aciman, hailed as a writer of “fiction at its most supremely interesting” (The New York Review of Books), has written a novel that charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men; whether he’s on a tennis court in Central Park, or on a New York sidewalk in early spring, 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 Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist. 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 to offer only what we crave from them. Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later we discover who we’ve always known we were.

Part Two explores the thought, feelings, and behavior of the direct participants in the Boxer experience, individuals who, without a preconceived idea of the entire event, understood what was happening to them in a manner fundamentally different from historians.