In Other Words: A Memoir

Even if you're not learning a language, you will be moved by Jhumpa Lahir and her love affair with Italian. I might even call this a love story, where the pursuer is pursuing an unsuspecting, challenging and unknowing partner - The Italian Language. Ms. Lahir's metaphors are amazing and amusing.Here's a little passage that really hit home as one who has been studying Italian for two years; recently spending three months at Università per Stranieri in Perugia."I gather words that seem obscure (sciagura, spigliatezza: disaster, casualness) and ones that I can easily understand but would like to know better (inviperito, stralunato: incensed, out of one’s wits). I gather beautiful words that have no exact equivalents in English (formicolare, chiarore: to move in a confused fashion, like ants, and also to have pins and needles; shaft of light). I gather countless adjectives (malmesso, plumbeo, impiastricciate: shabby, leaden, smeared) to describe thousands of situations. I gather countless nouns and adverbs that I will never use. ​ At the end of the day the basket is heavy, overflowing. I feel loaded down, wealthy, in high spirits. My words seem more valuable than money. I am like a beggar who finds a pile of gold, a bag of jewels.But when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the basket is memory, and memory betrays me, memory doesn’t hold up. I feel a bond with every word I pick up. I feel affection, along with a sense of responsibility. When I can’t remember words, I fear I’ve abandoned them. ​" As anyone who is studying a language, they will tell you, the experience she describes above, feels so familiar!She finds herself learning not only the language but also a beautiful insight into the culture. Insight even a seasoned tourist would not be exposed to. You will learn how this brilliant Pulitzer Prize author humbly approaches this task and you will be moved.This is a quick read, cleverly written that will relate to you if you're learning a language, or maybe even encouraged to learn that language you've been thinking about learning for all these years.Highly recommended.Rocco Capobianco

A deeply personal and moving account of learning a foreign language. Some readers have griped that she spends too much time discussing the process of learning Italian, ignoring other, arguably more interesting aspects of life in Rome, like culture and the logistics of moving abroad. Personally, though, I appreciated this intense focus. As someone who has learned several foreign languages, lived abroad in various countries for years, and read travel literature extensively, I was relieved to find a writer who didn’t wax poetic about travel and try to neatly summarize another culture, who instead chose the riskier (and braver) task of showing just how messy and jarring being immersed in another language is. (Read enough travel literature, and you too, will become tired of neat, beautifully-written narratives that serve only to show how brave and smart the writer thinks they are, while pretending to be about loftier topics like culture and politics. Vulnerability is refreshing, even if it occasionally produces unpolished sentences.)Although her writing is sparse, and sometimes cliché, it manages to pack a punch. It’s both deeply vulnerable and distant, a tension that kept me interested until the end.It’s certainly not written for mass appeal. I suspect those who’d be most interested are language learners who can relate to the author’s experiences. Towards the end of the book, she draws a parallel between her writing in Italian and Matisse’s abstract cutouts. The analogy seems apt: this book isn’t about realism, despite its autobiographical nature. It’s more of an impression, an intense depiction of learning, rather than a real life portrait of life abroad.The following excerpts capture her intentions in writing this book quite well:- “It’s a travel book, more interior, I would say, than geographic…And absurd journey, given that the traveler never reaches her destination.”- “In Italian, I’m moving toward abstraction. The places are undefined, the characters so far are nameless, without a particular cultural identity. The result, I think, is writing that is freed in certain ways from the concrete world.”

While reading Lahiri’s In Other Words, I found the book to be beautifully natural. Lahiri found a way to put her thoughts down on paper while being very authentic. Normally while reading literature, I find myself wanting authors to be more pure, and less edited in what they truly want to put down on paper. I found the piece to be the complete opposite of what I normally read, which was very refreshing. I was able to get a true understanding of what went through Lahiri’s mind while writing In Other Words. There were many points where she opens up, letting herself be truly vulnerable in her writing. It shows how you can be very powerful with your words; speaking your mind can add a whole new layer to your concepts. While I have found many authors protect their ideas, Lahiri shows a new way of expressing her thoughts, imparting a great amount of passion towards her journey of learning language.I did find the book to be a little repetitive. It felt a little too long for the type of story. It would have been easier to read if it was condensed down.I also really appreciated the amount of relatability in this piece. As a college student, I have taken many language classes, but have struggled to perfect the language, regardless of the amount of years I have spoken it. Lahiri struggles with this as well. She bounces between many Italian tutors, yet feels incomplete since she has not been immersed long enough in the Italian culture to really grasp Italian. A large population of people struggle with acquiring a second language, and this common place makes the book just that much more relatable. So many people want to read about topics that they can empathize with, and this topic on the difficulty of learning a language is valuable to a lot of different types of people.