Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons and Albert Camus’s “L’hôte” manifest two cases of impossible and possible hospitality, respectively, in the colonial Mediterranean, directly related to the two authors’ antithetical stance on the Mediterranean as a whole. Durrell negotiates the Sea through a colonialist and orientalist lens; Camus proposes a transcultural and transnational Mediterranean. Ultimately, the impossibility of hospitality in Bitter Lemons vis-à-vis its realization in “L’hôte” rests with an antithetical understanding of hospitality itself: Durrell’s is bounded in the frame of the nation state and of colonial boundaries, in notions of spatial rootedness, and physical ownership; Camus’s foregrounds man’s unstable relation to place and the temporariness of habitation—man’s simultaneous status as host and guest, or as neither. In this framework (in which Lévinas’s emphasis on “proximity” between the self and the other, and the ethical responsibility entailed by the face to face encounter, may be more fruitful than Derrida’s spatialized understanding of hospitality), true hospitality is possible only in a state of exile, as man’s actual-lived condition: a state of constant mobility, displacement, or homelessness. Remembering (relocating) hospitality in the Mediterranean is, ultimately, re-constructing the Sea as a utopian “home” of continuous uprooting and (re)implantation of the self; (following Schérer) as a utopia of, or as, hospitality.