... an engrossing book, beautifully produced and illustrated with color photographs of paintings. At times it made me think of Watermark, Joseph Brodsky’s elegy to Venice, and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Written in elegant, concise prose, it is a remarkable meditation on life, loss, mourning, exile, friendship and the power of art.

Matar is a master of pellucid statement that seems simple yet is exactly right. He describes the city beautifully ... He is equally eloquent about the paintings he loves, many of them reproduced in the book ... This is an exquisite, deeply affecting book, one in which an experience of dislocation and loss is conveyed in prose that flows so clearly and gracefully it finds continuities and connections all the time. It is also, although Proust is not among the many artists directly cited here, profoundly Proust-ian, many sentences actually adopting his syntax, becoming themselves acts of comprehension and recovery.

A Month in Siena bears all the hallmarks of Matar’s writing: it is exquisitely constructed and the use of language is precise and delicately nuanced without pretension. And there is a deceptive simplicity to his endeavour: to look at art. What emerges is an altogether more complex philosophical exploration of death, love, art, relationships and time ... As he communes for days with a single painting, it reveals itself to him—and him to himself.

The description is exact and graceful, as Matar’s prose tends to be ... A Month in Siena resists the narrative markers we might expect. There’s a lovely section about Matar’s meeting with a Jordanian who invites him into his Sienese home, and another about going reluctantly to a 90th-birthday party for a dear old friend in a villa not far away. But these are passed over as peripheral to the main action — which is paintings as experience ... The book is not a travel guide, though it has a fine evocation of the spatial effects of Siena’s fan-shaped central piazza and a thumbnail history of how the Black Death changed Europe. Nor is it straight art criticism or even straight memoir. It will be read most happily by fans of Hisham Matar’s other work, who want further access to a mind that takes in details with a charged concentration that meanders to larger thought. It is a book that requires some patience. It is arguing for the power of art to answer a longing to be 'recognized,' while bringing about the rediscovery of 'our own powers of remembrance,' a pastime that demands the closest possible attention.

A Month in Siena is a sweet, short mediation on art, grief, and life ... The book is threaded with delicate strands of belonging, exile, restraint, grief and absence, allowing the reader to pick out whatever she chooses. In this way it becomes like the paintings it describes, which interleave the book in bright colours. But this is never overwhelming ... A Month in Siena is a brilliant miniature, a fugue but also a release. Its intellectual and emotional depth is never forced, never exclusive. Concerning grief as much as art, it is a considered attempt to explain both, while allowing that nothing can be contained fully within a single book, painting, city, or life.

A Month in Siena is as much about the city and its people as it is about the famous artworks ... Matar writes evocatively of what it is like to live in this beautiful medieval city ... But it is about Siena’s art that Matar writes most movingly. He spends so much time in one gallery every day that the staff bring him a folding chair to use. From Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescos in the Palazzo Pubblico to others from the Sienese school in the Pinacoteca museum, the enigmatic paintings prompt wonderfully original riffs on history, time, love and the purpose of art itself ... This slim, beautifully produced book, which includes illustrations of the key paintings, sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss. Matar’s prose is exquisitely measured and precise – not unlike one of the paintings from the Sienese school that he has admired for so many years.

...[a] thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author’s visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana ... A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.