“Aciman’s refusal to be in only one place at a time is what makes him wholly present to us. If he is fully alive anywhere, it is on the page—as a writer, in his own pages, and also as a reader, in the pages of the writers he loves. You don’t need to have lost an Alexandria to understand what he does with place and time and memory. After all, we are all exiles in a way—from our own childhoods, our own pasts, if nothing else. It is that remembered aspect of ourselves, that shadowy other life, that André Aciman’s new book so piercingly addresses.”
—Wendy Lesser, The New York Times Book Review
“This new book shows a refined sensibility, and this author’s remarkable intellectual penetration and gift for language. It is a sequel to Out of Egypt with Mr Aciman dryly, wittily, urbanely examining the various meanings of a life lived in permanent exile, thoroughly cut off from the smells and colors of the past.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“A carefully wrought collection of very personal pieces with universal themes—home, place, deracination. This is writing (and thinking) at its finest Aciman sees all, past and present, from a substantial distance Being from neither here nor there has its advantages.”
—Michael J Agovino, Time Out New York
“Aciman, a native of Alexandria, Egypt, is an exceptional literary stylist, and this compilation of his essays is linked by the themes with which he is most at home: memory, loss, and imagination at play in the mind of the exile.”
—Talk Magazine
“Aciman is merely reminding us of what we already know deep down: Memory, in the end, is an act of imagination. Sometimes the world meets our expectations, and sometimes—not often, but on a few special occasions—we receive more than we ever imagined.”
—Jon Tribble, Chicago Tribune
“This exile has made himself a home in our imagination by articulating the impossibility of ever finding a home. Through language, he masters his frailties and ambivalences, and his mastery makes it possible for us to live with ours, too.”
–Kim Bendheim, The Forward
“Memory trumps life and existence acquires the hue of old hand-tinted photographs in this collection. 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’ Such insights illuminate the most shadowy corners of memory and motivation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Aciman’s prose is often characterized by exquisitely rendered pangs of homesickness. [His] elegant pieces recall the leisurely, reflective essays of Walter Benjamin and Michel Butor evoking a world that has disappeared.”
— Kirkus Reviews