Andre Aciman's My Roman Year a transporting memoir of adolescent exile

Most people remember their adolescence by its major furniture pieces lengthy school years, overstated rebellion, early pangs of desire.

- Shawn Hoo

Not Andre Aciman, who can conjure every rococo trimming of his adolescent exile in Rome, 1967.

My Roman Year, the ItalianAmerican writer's resplendent new memoir of cultural dislocation, comes three decades after his earlier place-based memoir, also his first book. Out Of Egypt (1995) dealt with his early childhood, raised in a Jewish family with Italian and Turkish roots, in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser's confiscation of Jewish property and expulsion of foreign nationals, which began in 1956, had finally caught up with Aciman's family a decade later. This earlier chapter, never explicitly contextualised in this newest memoir, sets the stage for My Roman Year's exilic feelings.

Thus begins Aciman's Roman memoir - his deaf mother, younger brother and him alighting from a ship, with 31 suitcases, into a refugee camp in Naples, leaving their father behind in Alexandria to continue an illicit affair.

The family eventually moves into the dingy Via Clelia in Rome, in a makeshift apartment that used to be a brothel.