Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss - Hardcover

New York Public Library

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565845048 ISBN 13: 9781565845046

Publisher: New Pr, 1999

Synopsis

"Moving, deeply introspective and honest" (Publishers Weekly) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors inLetters of Transit have written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is lost. Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.

About this title

About the Author

Andr Aciman, recipient of the 1995 Whiting Writer's Award for his highly acclaimed memoir Out of Egypt, lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Eva Hoffman, who received the Academy of American Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award for Lost in Translation, lives in London. Bharati Mukherjee, National Book Critics Circle Award winner for The Middleman and Other Stories, lives in Berkeley, California. Edward Said, author of Orientalism and Cultural Imperalism, lives in New York City. Charles Simic, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner, lives in New Hampshire.

Reviews

The five distinguished contributors to this volume agree that a homeland tends to be a nostalgic, imaginary place, not a real one, and that the home once lost can never be recovered. They also share a penchant for classifying the minute differences between refugees, exiles, immigrants and expatriates. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee adds another term: the assimilationist "mongrelizer" such as herself, who happily submerges oneself in a melting pot, while nonetheless retaining a sense of ethnic pride. Poet Charles Simic, originally from Belgrade, rejects the idea that exile or displacement means the permanent loss of any sense of home: he fell dizzyingly in love with his new country, and is amusing about his early attempts to assimilateAwearing "jeans, Hawaiian shirts, cowboy belts." Aciman beautifully captures the role that imagination plays in one's experience of "home" by exploring how a tiny park in a traffic island on the Upper West Side of Manhattan came to powerfully evoke the cities of Europe for him. Eva Hoffman's essay on the "new nomads" of the information age is the most theoretical and least satisfying piece. The real heart of the collection is Columbia professor Edward Said's memoir, inspired when "an ugly medical diagnosis suddenly revealed the mortality I should have known about before." His experience of receiving a colonial education just as the colonial system crumbled, of loving the world opened to him in his education while being stung by teachers' constant invocations of his difference, is moving, deeply introspective and honest.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In these distinct and forthcoming original essays, five prominent writers offer their meditations on exile and memory. The authors represented in Aciman's (Out of Egypt: A Memoir, 1995) collection are a varied lota not atypical sampling of men and women who have found their way to the US from around the world: Aciman, an Alexandrian in exile via Paris; Eva Hoffman, a Pole in exile via Canada; Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali in Berkeley; Edward Said, a Palestinian exile via Egypt; and Charles Simic, a Yugoslav exile of 1945 vintage. These voices of exile are unusually eloquent ones. All five authors are non-native speakers who write professionally in English. For them, the common duality and instability of exile are heightened by the very nature of their work. Aciman puts it well: ``their words . . . are the priceless buoys with which they try to stay afloat both as professional thinkers and human beings.'' The five essays differ in tone and style. The collection begins with Aciman's lyrical and imaginative essay on a park in New York that reminds him of the places of his past, or his ``shadow cities,'' and reaches its gravest moments in the heavy seriousness of Said's reflections on his professional and personal journey in America, with frequent references to Adorno. Hoffman examines the contradictions inherent in nomadism and diasporism, referring to her own life and those of other East European literary figures such as Nabokov, Kundera, Milosz, and Brodsky. Mukherjee, coming from a different perspective, writes about the process of immigration in the US as ``the stage, and the battleground, for the most exciting dramas of our time.'' Aciman made the right choice in closing with Simic's poem ``Cameo Appearance'' and his droll essay on his youthful exile and on the speed with which exile teaches the arbitrary nature of an individual's existence. A thoughtful and diverse collection with a distinctly literary bent. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565845048
• ISBN 13: 9781565845046
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 135
• Editor: Aciman Andre