This last point is key, because the book is really about is Lahiri’s attempt to create a third space between the poles of America and Calcutta-the twin histories she feels compelled to escape, which, at the same time, remain constantly beside her.Ĭharacters in Lahiri’s fiction frequently occupy the spaces between worlds. Among the joys (especially for a writer, and exuberantly communicated on every page): An inexhaustible trove of words to collect and treasure the possibility of accessing a completely novel way of understanding the world and the possibility of fashioning a completely novel self in that world. Among the difficulties: How language learning outside the ultra-plastic state of childhood places one in the posture of perpetual code-cracking sleuth the way in which new grammars may also present unfamiliar ways of understanding time and how even conversational facility, once achieved, gives one little purchase on written fluency. Originally written in Italian and translated by Ann Goldstein, the book describes Lahiri’s decades-long quest to learn that language, distilling from the experience some universal truths. In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri’s new memoir, is first and foremost a rare record of the joy and difficulty of learning a foreign language as an adult.
In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein
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