The Arab identity too is profoundly problematic. For one, Arabic is prohibited in the "Victoria College" he attends (a prohibition his Arabic-speaking classmates and he subvert scatologically). For another, his parents hardly ever discuss the "problem of Palestine and its tragic loss". The repression of Palestine "occurred as part of a larger depoliticization on the part of my parents, who hated and distrusted politics, feeling too precarious in Egypt for participation, or even open discussion. Politics always seemed to involve other people, not us." Neither Yasser Arafat, nor terrorism are ever mentioned in this book; Out of Place in that sense is only marginally a "political" book, describing the trajectory of a life that was to become intensely politically engaged — Said has been writing and speaking on Palestine for the last 30 years.

But of course, the silence within the family notwithstanding, political events were not to leave the prosperous Saids untouched either: "my aunt Nabiha’s family would be driven out of Jerusalem in stages" he says. Later, in the rioting in 1952 as monarchial Egypt disappeared, Wadie Said’s businesses were "totally gutted" by a mob. The extraordinary Said senior simply said, "let’s roll up our sleeves, and begin again"!

The emotional counterweight to the Victorian father is Hilda, Edward’s mother. "It was my mother’s often melting warmth which offered me a rare opportunity to be the person I felt I truly was in contrast to the "Edward" who failed at school and sports, and could never match the manliness my father represented."

It is from Hilda that Edward gets his abiding love for music and books. He recalls luminously one instance of that shared love: "The two of us sat in the front reception room...and we read Hamlet together.... Reading Hamlet as an affirmation of my status in her eyes, not as someone devalued, which I had become in mine, was one of the great moments in my childhood."

Hilda speaks to and awakens that "other Edward", who could read, think, and even write independent of "Edward". Even before his departure for USA in 1951 and his subsequent brilliant academic career, "I was aware of myself making connections between disparate books and ideas with considerable ease.... My greatest gift was memory... I would have moments of exultant recollection that enabled me to look out over a sea of details, spotting patterns, phrases, world clusters, which I imagined as stretching out interconnectedly without limit".

However, these were numinous moments; Said’s portrayal of himself throughout his childhood is that of "a growing sense of discomfort, rebelliousness, drift, and loneliness". Both as narrator and as character, Said says in the Preface, "I have consciously not spared myself the same ironies or embarrassing recitals". While that soul-baring is often searing, it does occasionally verge on self-pity.

Still, after a life so closely examined, how many can say the following? "As I write now, it gives me a chance, very late in life, to record the experiences as a coherent whole that very strangely have left no anger, some sorrow, and a surprisingly strong residual love for my parents."

As Salman Rushdie notes, this "is an intensely moving act of reclamation and understanding". No surprise then that Out of Place won the New Yorker Book Award.

A Giridhar Rao