Jhumpa Lahiri's 'In Other Words': Anxious Italian, for her and us
An intimate, obsessive, navel-gazing adventure, Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words is ostensibly about learning Italian. But in this, her first nonfiction book, Lahiri intriguingly and delicately moves beyond tattered dictionaries to reveal a woman struggling to accept herself, with flaws.
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In Other Words
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Translated by Ann Goldstein
Knopf. 256 pages. $26.95 nolead ends
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Reviewed by Dawn Fallik
nolead ends An intimate, obsessive, navel-gazing adventure, Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words is ostensibly about learning Italian. But in this, her first nonfiction book, Lahiri intriguingly and delicately moves beyond tattered dictionaries to reveal a woman struggling to accept herself, with flaws.
The London-born Lahiri speaks Bengali because her parents did, but she became fluent in English growing up in the United States, going on to get a Ph.D. (in Renaissance studies at Boston University), win all sorts of literary prizes, and become a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
Yet she yearns to speak Italian and master all its quirks. It's not enough to take classes in New York, so she packs her children and husband off to Rome for several years. Yes, a wealthy, famous, stunningly beautiful author moves to Italy for a couple of years to find herself. The struggle: It's real.
She never seems to relax and enjoy. In a language and culture that embrace the wild messiness of life, she's desperate for perfection. Lahiri wrote the book in Italian, which appears on the left-hand pages. On the right is an English translation by Ann Goldstein, not only a New Yorker editor but perhaps the hottest translator of Italian on the planet, having brought Elena Ferrante's Naples quartet into our tongue. Goldstein's faithful translation reads simply, in short chapters and sentences. This is part of the charm of In Other Words - and it makes it so different from the rich linguistic complexity of Lahiri's fictional works.
Lahiri agonizes over her failure to grasp the idiosyncratic Italian use of prepositions and articles. Her frustration screams from the pages, and the reader shares in it, sometimes to the point of needing a glass of wine.
Her lessons are really about accepting herself. In a telling chapter, "The Wall," she describes how her physical appearance affects her ability to accept. In Italy, shopkeepers automatically speak to her in English. In the States, if she doesn't speak, people assume she's a foreigner without English. In India, people are surprised she speaks Bengali.
"I'm a writer: I identify myself completely with language, I work with it," she writes. "And yet the wall keeps me at a distance, separates me. The wall is inevitable. It surrounds me wherever I go, so that I wonder if perhaps the wall is me."
Dawn Fallik is a former Inquirer staff writer and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Delaware.