- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (Sep 8 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312420056
- ISBN-13: 978-0312420055
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 14 x 1.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 200 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #849,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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.
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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Uniquely compelling voice,
By A Customer
This review is from: False Papers (Paperback)
Andre Aciman compels with a unique and reflective voice such that False Papers is more than a book. It is a soul that at first embraces, and finally engulfs, so that when the reader finally sets the book down, he will be shocked to learn that he is only himself, and not the sojouring spirit on the page.
1.0 out of 5 stars
mediocre, banal and self-righteous,
By michael kahn (Long Island) - See all my reviews
This review is from: False Papers (Paperback)
I found Mr.Aciman's essays suffering from a infatuation with his own self-righteousness. Preachy, bigoted and too often innacurate, he bakes a quite dull mixture of bloated prose and shallow, prejuciced view about many subjects one suspects he knows little or nothing about. The books distils the grandiose retorique of cocktail-party chatter and leaves the reader with a sad sense of having wasted his own time. My advice would be to seriously check it out at a public library before devoting time and money to this thing. Life's too short for this kind of drivel.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Residues of Exile,
By Daniel Schwartz (New York CIty) - See all my reviews
This review is from: False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (Hardcover)
Andre Aciman is an astoundingly gifted writer. When I first read his memoir "Out of Egypt" five years ago, I was amazed by its wit and wisdom, its precious and seamless blend of irony and deep feeling. Having followed his career in writing ever since, I am thrilled by the recent publication of "False Papers," a magnificent compilation of fourteen of his best essays from the past few years. These pieces can be seen as a kind of sequel to "Out of Egypt," an extension of its central theme of exile in new, often unexpected directions. In "Out of Egypt" Aciman vividly reminisced about his childhood years in Alexandria up to their dismal end, when amid the virulent anti-Semitism of Nasser's Egypt he and his family were expelled. The essays of "False Papers," by contrast, pertain more to the intellectual and emotional residues of exile-in particular the "confused, back-and-forth, up-and-around" way of thinking, remembering, desiring, and relating to oneself and to others that exile seems to foster. Aciman writes poignantly but analyzes ruthlessly: he may be one of the most introspective of current writers, and at a time when memoirs and confessions line the shelves, but refreshingly, he is also one of the least self-indulgent and complacent. Complexity does not faze him. He excels at finding a concrete metaphor, typically from far afield, to convey some paradox of memory or desire: for instance, his surprisingly apt use of the financial term "arbitrage" to illustrate how one might "firm up the present...by experiencing it from the future as a moment in the past," much like an arbitrageur might trade securities in different markets to benefit from different prices. He can qualify thoughts and impressions without diluting them into a muddle, and even, occasionally, cast doubt on the relevance of his most reliable figures and tropes-to wit, exile-without sacrificing any of his writing's underlying pathos. Few, in short, can match Aciman when it comes to a grasp of the fitful economy of the soul, and even fewer could hope to write about it so deftly and affectingly.Those, like myself, who have already read and enjoyed Aciman's essays on their first appearance in print will want to own a book that brings them all together. Those who have not are to be envied the opportunity to read them in "False Papers" for the first time.
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