In Other Words
A Memoir
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Namesake delivers a powerful meditation on the process of learning to express herself in Italian—and the stunning journey of a writer seeking a new voice. • "The most evocative, unpretentious, astute account of a writing life I have read.” —The Washington Post
On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. In Other Words is a startling act of self-reflection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
