9780312420055
False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory share button
Andre Aciman
Format Paperback
Dimensions 5.43 (w) x 8.28 (h) x 0.46 (d)
Pages 192
Publisher Picador
Publication Date September 2001
ISBN 9780312420055
Book ISBN 10 0312420056
About Book

In these fourteen essays Andre Aciman, one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, dissects the experience of loss, moving from his forced departure from Alexandria as a teenager, though his brief stay in Europe and finally to the home he's made (and half invented) on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Reviews

From the Publisher

"Over and over in the course of these linked essays Aciman shows himself wanting to be elsewhere . . . 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 Andre Aciman's new book so piercingly addresses."—Wendy Lesser, NYTBR

"The incomplete and unstable state of nostalgia is what Aciman tries to fix in this beautiful memoir. He lives in his mind. But sharing that mind is a rare privilege."—Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe

"One feels that if Proust had not existed Mr Aciman would have invented him."—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

Wendy Lesser

. . . a cleareyed look at several beloved writers, a tempered discussion of nationality and ethnicity, a recurrent examination of the nature of love, a celebration of the exile's adopted city, New York.
The New York Times Book Review

Talk Magazine

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.

Michael J. Agovino

Aciman's book never becomes repetitive. Each essay has a fresh turn of phrase, of observance. This is writing (and thinking) at its finest. Aciman sees all, past and present, from a substantial distance.Being from nither here nor there has its advantages.
Time Out New York