This is what she tells listeners during the English chapters that open the book, but the truth of it is not apparent until they hear the story told all over again in the language of her choosing. It's not just that her accent is flawless but that Italian allows her access to a more avid, colorful, uninhibited version of herself. Speaking in Italian, however, her voice takes on added depth and fervor. Her emotional register feels monochromatic even when she is giving voice to her deepest longings, and the performance falls flat, particularly during the very short pieces of fiction she weaves in: every character sounds the same. In English, Lahiri makes for a quiet and unassuming narrator.
In the print version of this memoir, which Lahiri wrote in Italian, Lahiri's Italian words and their English translation are side by side on facing pages here, she narrates the entire memoir in English before doing it all over again in Italian, starting in the third compact disc.
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She tells of her initial passion for learning Italian, her third language after Bengali and English, and her decision to move her husband and two children to Rome for the full experience. Lahiri, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning novelist of Interpreter of Maladies, tries her hand at memoir and audiobook narration with this brief recounting of her quest to immerse herself in the Italian language. Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. There, she begins to read, and to write-initially in her journal-solely in Italian.
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Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for “a trial by fire, a sort of baptism” into a new language and world. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. It is at heart a love story-of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language.
From the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful nonfiction debut-an “honest, engaging, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred)
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