We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). 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.Īn honest, self-deprecating, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words. “To investigate the mystery of existence. Her memoir is also chockablock with memorable comments about writing and language.

She is more interested in the effects of all of this on her writing and on her identity. Lahiri does not ever get too detailed about the specifics of her learning, although there are paragraphs about vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. 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. She notes that similar experiences happened in the United States. 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. 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. As she acknowledges near the end, and suggests elsewhere, her work is thick with metaphor continually, she tries to find effective comparisons. 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. 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.

In a perfectly titled memoir, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist chronicles her efforts to learn and write Italian.

In other words by jhumpa lahiri