Some books have an assured quality that is a pleasure to inhabit. A Month in Sienna by [a:Hisham Matar|35807|Hisham Matar|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1210621856p2/35807.jpg] is one of these. This is beautifully written, charming wander through Sienna’s streets, paintings, and thoughts by a man of fine intelligence. I’m fortunate to have known Sienna but it is not necessary for the reader to have been there to appreciate this book. Hisham Mater has alerted me to the work of the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldûn (the Introduction to history or The Muqaddimah which I will seek out.

I exist mostly on one side of time. Only in rare moments – for example, when I am with those I love or in times of great exuberance or when I am writing and the work is going well – do I feel free from the wish to be anywhere else. (p. 96)

Thank you for lending me this book Toby. ( )

A rather slight, meandering memoir. Matar does the thing I've often wished I could do: settle in a small, congenial, picturesque European town for a month, and spend my days walking, exploring, and looking at art. I got two days in Assisi a couple of years ago, and wished I had ten times longer. At least.

Erudite, thoughtful, patient and pensive, Matar spends so much time looking at a single painting that the women guards at the local museum give him one of their folding chairs so he will be more comfortable. But somehow, his ponderings remain just that: his own ponderings. They give a little basic history of the paintings, but provide little enlightenment or depth of understanding. There is much to be said for serious, detailed observation, especially perhaps from the eye of a Muslim on these ineradicably Christian works, but it just doesn't quite go anywhere. There are color reproductions of the main pictures he looks at, but they are small and murky in color - Google them on your iPad for better images. Other chapters are devoted to friendly encounters with immigrant residents of Siena, a loving wander in Rome with his wife, a bench in a local cemetery, and the ravages of the Black Death. Overall, it's a pleasant read, with some interest for early Renaissance Italian painting, but felt rather like a bunch of excerpts from his journal bound together. A light hors d'oeuvre, but not ultimately very satisfying.

juliestielstra.com ( )

Hisham Matar spent a month in Siena, examining centuries-old Siennese art and wondering about a multitude of things - not only that which the art presented, but the other things happening in his life, the things that had happened and that had affected him... Though this is a short book, it is affecting, all the same, and leads the reader down many paths that one is free to consider at one's leisure. A good book, and I'm glad I read it. ( )

Isn’t this at least one definition of happiness, I thought, to be anticipated? ( )

Yes, this explores an individual's experience of the masterworks of Sienese art, but it is also a very personal exploration of the experience of time and loss and dealing with the unknowable as the author had completed writing about his unresolved search in Libya for traces of his disappeared father and was in Siena where he knew no one and had no external agenda. ( )