From Publishers Weekly
Memory trumps life and existence acquires the hue of old hand-tinted photographs in this collection of 14 essays by a self-defined perennial expatriate. Aciman, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, grew up in Egypt, Italy and France, and lives in Manhattan. Taking up again the themes of Out of Egypt, his acclaimed memoir of his family's lost life in Alexandria, he fumbles for the nebulous essence of a rootless existence. On a return trip to Alexandria, he tentatively visits old apartment buildings, the Graeco-Roman Museum and the Jewish cemetery, each site leached of visceral impact and replotted on an abstract, internal map. In Paris, a trip to the Square Lamartine in the 16th arrondissement calls to mind the few winter weeks he spent in the city when he was 14. Straus Park, a small, neglected and magically marginal triangle of ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, comes to symbolize all the cities he has ever known and loved. Farther afield, he visits Proust's hometown of Illiers, touring the Proust Museum just a few days before Christmas with a select group of Proust enthusiasts, and travels to Bethlehem, where the tension among Muslims, Christians and Jews reminds him of Alexandria. A final few pieces explore the patterns of love affairs in New York: bus routes remembered, cafes revisited, sentiments examined. Aciman makes an art of indirection. He travels, he ruefully explains, "not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip. This, it occurs to me, is also how I live." So long as he keeps from slipping into a repetitive, rarified exaltation of displacement, such insights illuminate the most shadowy corners of memory and motivation. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Fourteen essays on the nature of memory are collected here from the writings of Aciman, who contributes regularly to such publications as The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Like Marcel Proust, Aciman has the ability to show you something you had always suspected but had never put into words. In Pensione Eolo, he discusses nostalgia, which he regards as the longing for the memory of a place rather than the place itself. In Alexandria: The Capital of Memory, he observes that he lives much as he travels: to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip. Among the other essays included are Letter from Illiers-Combray: In Search of Proust, In the Muslim City of Bethlehem, and In Double Exile. Aciman (literature, Bard Coll.), who recounted the exodus of his Jewish family from Alexandria in Out of Egypt, has lived as an exile in Italy and France and currently resides in New York. While the thematic range of the pieces borders on the repetitious, turns of phrase (such as What do you do with so much blue once you!ve seen it? ) give delightful chills. Aciman dissects his feelings so thoroughly that many readers will recognize themselves here and there, even if they are not world travelers."Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
