Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories ... Both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.
This is not, in style or spirit, a sad book. It’s filled with canny adaptiveness and invention ... Aciman is a sensitive and passionate writer, and this volume’s packed with human incident ... A brave, sensuous, tender chronicle.
Aciman isn’t merely turning the yellowed pages of a family album, and his storytelling skills, always at their sharpest and least self-indulgent in his nonfiction, hardly ever desert him here ... Convincing.