Thursday, March 2, 2017

March Not Fiction Book Discussion

If Lab Girl is about science as a place, In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri is about language as a place. For her epigraph, Lahiri chose this quotation from Antonio Tabucchi: " . . . I needed a different language: a language that was a place of affection and reflection." A native speaker of Bengali and a well-awarded writer in English, Lahiri decided to immerse herself in Italian, moving her family to Rome and reading and writing exclusively in Italian for several years. This book is the result of her affection for that language and her reflections on her life as a writer.

Lahiri wrote it in Italian, and it is published with the English translation by Ann Goldstein on the facing page, so that readers can compare. While readers might expect a conventional travel memoir complete with rapturous descriptions of food and local color, Lahiri told Isaac Chotiner at Slate,
Everyone calls it a memoir. It's not. I've never thought of it as a memoir. It's a very different piece of writing. It came from a very different place. I was never, ever thinking of the book in those terms. I never even thought that it would be a book. When it was published in Italy last year, when it was published in Holland, in Sweden and France and other places, nobody has referred to it as a memoir. . . . When the book was published last year, I found myself talking in depth and at length about the language question. . . . The [question of whether] this is a transgressive act or not, and what it means, and the repercussions of this. There is, I think, a sort of philosophical aspect to the book, if you will. I feel that in all of the interviews I've done so far for the English edition, that has been skimmed if not totally ignored, and rather, it's more about, "What did your kids feel about going to Italy? What did your parents feel about your going to Italy? What was it like?" These more personal elements. I repeat, I don't feel that it is a memoir. It is an autobiographical work with two short stories in it as well, so it's a kind of weird mixed genre or out-of-genre kind of work.
Her language is spare and makes good use of metaphor, giving it the feel of a prose poem. She reflects on the relationship between language and a sense of belonging or exile. She considers the paradox of how her writing in Italian is both more autobiographical than her fiction about the Indian immigrant experience and yet more abstract. She asks the big question that all writers must consider at some point in their careers: "Why do I write?"

What do you think? Have you ever learned a new language and maybe even moved to a new country to live? Reflect on your experience. Did you feel a sense of exile, of being outside not just the language but also the culture? How did you cope? Explore some of the many metaphors Lahiri uses to convey her relationship to language and writing. Which did you find effective and enlightening? How would you define In Other Words? If it isn't a memoir, then what genre is it? Where would you look for it at a bookstore or library? Lahiri suggests that her book is more autobiographical because it is more abstract. How can this be true? What portrait of Lahiri emerges from her book? What is it about?

We hope you'll join the discussion: Tuesday, March 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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