Out of Place

This book brings to life an unimaginable world of compelling artistic figures. It is a lyrical and beautifully crafted text, at times as candid as it is intimate and humorous. Edward Said reveals the intricacies of his personal past, exploring the individuals who shaped him and enabled him to triumph as one of the most prominent intellectuals of our time. In other words, the book is an extraordinary story of exile, a narrative of multiple journeys, and a celebration of an irretrievable past.
In 1991, Edward Said received a devastating medical diagnosis that convinced him of the need to leave behind a record of the place where he was born and spent his childhood. In these memoirs, Edward Said rediscovers the Arab landscape of his early years: “So many places have vanished, so many people are no longer alive… In short, it’s a vanished world.” That landscape has undergone many transformations: Palestine became Israel, Lebanon was turned upside down after twenty years of civil war, and King Farouk’s colonial Egypt was irrevocably destroyed in 1952.
Finally, but not least, what is new about the complex Edward Said that emerges from these pages is that he is an Arab whose Western culture has affirmed his Arab origins, and that this culture (as Edward says in the book’s introduction)