In Other Words

November 9, 2015
Readers who have followed Pulitzer-winner Lahiri's stellar career might be surprised to discover that she has written her latest book in Italian. In this slim, lyrical nonfiction debut, Lahiri (The Lowland) traces the progress of her love affair with the Italian language and the steps that caused her to move to Italy and stop reading and writing in English. Unlike Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, who also wrote in adopted languages, Lahiri doesn't leap directly into fiction. Though the book contains a short story, "The Exchange," Lahiri's first order of business is to tell her own story. She writes exquisitely about her experiences with language: her first language was Bengali, but when her family moved to the United States, she made a difficult adjustment to using English at nursery school. Now, she reports, her literary life in English seems distant and unmoored from her self. By embracing the increased difficulty of writing in a new language, Lahiri has forced herself to write in short, syntactically simple sentences. For admirers of her previous work, it will feel strange but pleasant to read her writing in translation. Lahiri's unexpected metamorphosis provides a captivating and insightful lesson in the power of language to transform.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
In a perfectly titled memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist chronicles her efforts to learn and write Italian. Lahiri (The Lowland, 2013, etc.), who wrote and published her text in Italian in 2015, now presents an English translation (by Goldstein) with Italian and English on facing pages. For Lahiri, Italian was her third language--her mother spoke Bengali--and she relates in engaging detail the reasons she felt drawn to Italian, her many difficulties learning it, her struggles with writing, and her move to Rome to write. As she acknowledges near the end, and suggests elsewhere, her work is thick with metaphor; continually, she tries to find effective comparisons. A swim across a lake, an avalanche, a mountain-climb, a journey, a map, a bridge, maternity--these and numerous others describe her learning and her difficulties. A most affecting later chapter, "The Wall," deals with a discomfort felt (and caused) by many: Lahiri doesn't "look" Italian, so Romans and others treated her oddly, even insultingly, at times. She notes that similar experiences happened in the United States. Even though she's known English since childhood--and has written award-winning novels in the language--some Americans look at her with a kind of mistrust. Lahiri does not ever get too detailed about the specifics of her learning, although there are paragraphs about vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. She is more interested in the effects of all of this on her writing and on her identity. Her memoir is also chockablock with memorable comments about writing and language. "Why do I write?" she asks. "To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me." At the end, she returns to America but wonders if she will now write again in English. An honest, self-deprecating, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words.

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Starred review from November 15, 2015
Celebrated short story writer and novelist Lahiri (The Lowland, 2013) presents her first book of nonfiction and first book not written in English. The why and how of this radical change in her literary life is the primary theme in this arresting, intricate, bilingual chronicle of a daring experiment. Lahiri experienced her first linguistic complication as a girl when her family left Calcutta for America, where she spoke Bengali at home and English everywhere else. She fell in enchanted love with Italian as a graduate student and pursued this ardor for years without achieving fluency. So she decided to move to Rome with her husband and young children so that she could live and breathe Italian. Lahiri writes lithely and perceptively about being a linguistic pilgrim and her first attempt to write in Italian: I've never felt so stupid. It is acutely disorienting for a writer to lose her facility with language, which was the jolt and challenge Lahiri felt she needed to take a new artistic approach. Indeed, there is a cadence of discovery in these elegantly turned, metaphor-inlaid essays, while the two short stories Lahiri includes present us with a pared-down, more direct, more universal voice. A richly meditative, revealing, and involving linguistic autobiography about language and the self, creativity, risk, and metamorphosis. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lahiri's acclaim and popularity ensure avid interest in her first autobiographical book and its tale of creative audacity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 15, 2016

Lahiri (creative writing, Princeton Univ.) is internationally renowned for her novels The Namesake and The Lowland, her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and other writings. This new memoir, which the author wrote in Italian, is a great surprise. There's a second surprise, too: the English translation, here presented opposite the Italian, on every recto, by Goldstein (a New Yorker editor who has translated Elena Ferrante and Primo Levi, among others). The book is a series of journal entries that meditate upon Lahiri's frustrations and joys while learning Italian, and her growing desire to use that language only. It delves deeply into the author's relationship with languages generally--as the American-raised daughter of Indian immigrants, her Italian experiment is not the first time she's been caught between two linguistic worlds, accepted by neither. Students of other languages will nod in recognition as Lahiri describes her growing hostility toward English, a tongue she begins to find "overbearing, domineering, full of itself." VERDICT This unusual memoir is a must for language learners exploring their motivations; it will also resonate with Lahiri's fans and other literary fiction lovers. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]--Henrietta Verma, formerly with Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2015

Having fallen in love with the Italian language on a trip to Florence after college, Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri decided to pursue the affair wholeheartedly by moving her family to Italy in 2012. Written in Italian and presented here in a bilingual edition, Lahiri's first work of nonfiction considers what it's like to learn a new language and, as a writer, learn to speak in a new voice

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2016

Lahiri (creative writing, Princeton Univ.) is internationally renowned for her novels The Namesake and The Lowland, her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and other writings. This new memoir, which the author wrote in Italian, is a great surprise. There's a second surprise, too: the English translation, here presented opposite the Italian, on every recto, by Goldstein (a New Yorker editor who has translated Elena Ferrante and Primo Levi, among others). The book is a series of journal entries that meditate upon Lahiri's frustrations and joys while learning Italian, and her growing desire to use that language only. It delves deeply into the author's relationship with languages generally--as the American-raised daughter of Indian immigrants, her Italian experiment is not the first time she's been caught between two linguistic worlds, accepted by neither. Students of other languages will nod in recognition as Lahiri describes her growing hostility toward English, a tongue she begins to find "overbearing, domineering, full of itself." VERDICT This unusual memoir is a must for language learners exploring their motivations; it will also resonate with Lahiri's fans and other literary fiction lovers. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]--Henrietta Verma, formerly with Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.