SOURCE: “The Nile of Time,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 11, 1993, pp. 2, 11.

In the following review, Iyer offers a positive assessment of In an Antique Land, particularly praising Ghosh's descriptions of his experiences in Egypt.

Modern Egypt is in part a swirl of Mexican restaurants and chador boutiques and guides speaking Japanese. But in its alleyways and souks, and all around the villages in the countryside, Egypt still clops to a surprisingly ancient rhythm: boys wandering through mazes of mud-colored houses, date-palms under washed-out skies as in every other 19th-Century English print, women carrying baskets of vegetables on their heads. In Egypt, as in India, centuries co-exist like artifacts on a museum wall (and sometimes weirdly intermingle too, as in the 3000-year-old treasures kept in 2000-year-old conditions in Cairo's infamous Egyptian Museum).

That sense of agelessness—and the way it translates into placelessness—is the driving engine...