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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"Lovely . . . mixes memory and imagination in seamless and beguiling ways." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Aciman, author of Out of Egypt (1995), ponders the nature of memory in a series of linked essays in which he not only remembers the past and revisits former haunts but remembers past remembrances and past revisits. What he's after is not so much the contrast between today's Alexandria and that of his boyhood, when he was a member of a rapidly dwindling Jewish population in the 1960s, or affirmation of his memories of his family's exile in Rome and Paris, but rather a dissection of nostalgia. Happily, this potentially abstract interpretation of the nexus between feeling and experience, and place and identity, takes the form of piquant and confidently ambiguous travel stories in the manner of Patricia Hampl. Along the way, Aciman muses on his love of the sea; his mixed emotions upon finding his grandfather's long-unvisited grave; the mnemonic allure of an abandoned New York subway station; and his amazement at the ambient hostility in Bethlehem, where, as in so many contested lands, "memory, like spite, is bottomless." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
Essays on exile, dislocation, and nostalgia by a noted traveler and memoirist.Aciman (Out of Egypt, 1994) was born into a family of Jewish, Italian, and Turkish origins in Alexandria, Egypt. The memory of that part-Victorian, half-decayed outpost of the British Empire, from which most of the European Jewish population fled following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Nasserite nationalism, haunts these meditations on rootlessness. Aciman's prose is often characterized by exquisitely rendered pangs of homesickness, and it wanders along that edge between anger and nostalgia that is the exile's true domain. No Mediterranean, he writes, can stand looking at the tiny lights speckling the New Jersey cliffs at night and not remember a galaxy of little fishing boats that go out to sea at night, dotting the water with their tiny lights till dawn. But many of his essays are also celebratory; they praise the cities of exile--Rome, Paris, and especially New York--as places of possibility where Aciman could find a marchand de tabacs who would sell me cigarettes without asking questions or a sunny park bench on which to pass the time of day without being bothered for an identity card or an explanation. Although Aciman occasionally drifts into journalistic travelogue, more often he offers thoughtful, highly original aperçus through which run several themes: the meaning of the Passover seder and its remembrance of flight, the pleasures of city life and of discovering a city's forgotten past, and the difficulty of maintaining connections and memories across time and oceans.Aciman's elegant pieces recall the leisurely, reflective essays of Walter Benjamin and Michel Butor, like them evoking a world that has disappeared. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review