SOMETIME AT THE END of the 1980s, writer, critic and intellectual Edward Said began to be interested in the idea of writers’, musicians’ and other artists’ “late works”, or “late style” (Adorno’s term), fa-mously going on to teach a course in Colum-bia on the subject a decade later. Finally, he decided to write a book, announcing to his wife a week before he died on September 25, 2003, that he wanted to finish Late Style by December that year. As his wife Mariam tells us in the foreword, “Edward left us a tremen-dous amount of material… to allowus to fin-ish it and produce posthumously a version of what he had in mind.”

So, here it is, a gem of a book on literary (and music) criticism (Said’s thoughts on a canon of artists like Adorno, Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, C.P. Cavafy) put to-gether by long-time friend Michael Wood who believes Said never “wanted to finish this book… There would have been a time for this book about untimeliness, but this time was always: Not quite yet. Completing the work would have been too much like writing the end of a life, closing the long chapter about the making of the self that opened with Said’s book Beginnings, or even earlier, with his book on Conrad.”

Said’s interest in “late style” grew long be-fore he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991, which led him to writing, besides a se-ries of books, his memoir Out of Place (1999). But as Wood quotes Said: “I don’t think I was ever consciously afraid of dying… though I soon grew aware of the shortage of time.”

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