From Publishers Weekly
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.


The New York Times Book Review, Daniel Zalewski
The five eloquent writers included in Letters of Transit ... suggest that an uprooted life can, paradoxically, become a more fertile one.


From Kirkus Reviews
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Andre Aciman traces his migration from his home in Egypt to Italy, France, and the United States and compares his own transience with the unrootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first is lost. Returning to the political themes of his earlier work, Edward Said offers a personal exploration of his conflicting allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee analyzes her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers the comedy of bureaucracy he experienced as a sixteen-year-old "displaced person" in Paris after the war, and his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.

FROM THE CRITICS

Daniel Zalewski

The five eloquent writers included...suggest that an uprooted life can, paradoxically, become a more fertile one....Aciman, whose Jewish family left Egypt during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, is careful not to glamorize the exile's life...
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

In these distinct and forthcoming original essays, five prominent writers offer their meditations on exile and memory.