Written by Edward Said

Edward Said is one of the most celebrated cultural critics of the post-war world. Of his many books of literary, political and philosophical criticism, at least two have become classics. As a thinker, Said's career spans literature, politics, music, philosophy and history. As a dispossessed Palestinian growing up in the Middle East and subsequently living in the USA, he has witnessed the impact of the Second World War upon the Arab world, the dissolution of Palestine and the birth of Israel, the rise of Nasser and the PLO, the Lebanese Civil War and the faltering peace process of the 1990s. As a result, the publication of Said's memoir, Out of Place, is a particularly significant event. This is a fascinating account of the personal development of a critic and thinker who has straddled the divide between East and West and in the process has redefined Western perceptions of the East and of the plight of Palestinian people. However, as the title suggests, Said's memoir is a far more ambivalent and, at times, personally painful account of his early years in Palestine, Egypt and the Lebanon, and the often paralysing embrace of his loving but often overbearing parents. Said's memoir is powerfully informed by his sense of personally, geographically and linguistically "always being out of place". Born to Christian parents, caught between expressing himself in Arabic, English and French, Said evokes a vivid but often very unhappy portrait of growing up in Cairo and the Lebanon under the crushing weight of his emotionally intense and ambitious family. The early sections of the book paint a poignant picture of the oppressive regime established over the awkward, painfully uncertain young "Edward" by his loving mother and expectant, unforgiving father. Those expecting an account of Said's subsequent intellectual development will be disappointed; apart from the final 50 pages that deal with Said's education at Princeton and Harvard, Out of Place is, as Said says, primarily "a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, my early life". Composed in the light of serious illness, Out of Place is an elegantly written reflection on a life that has movingly come to terms with "being not quite right and out of place".