Book reviews: In Other Words and The Clothing of Books
It is the fifth book from the Pulitzer Prize winning author, but her first to be written in a language other than English. With 24 short chapters presented in alternating Italian and English passages, In Other Words charts the author’s journey from evening classes in America to moving her family to Rome. The short, engaging read is “a travel book, more interior, than geographic”.
Lahiri chose not to translate the book into English herself, favouring a translation by Ann Goldstein, a New Yorker editor. “I was reluctant to move back and forth between the two. My impulse at the time was to protect my Italian. Returning to English was disorienting, frustrating, also discouraging. It made me acutely aware how limited my Italian was compared with my English.”
The style of alternating between the two languages on every second page is initially jarring, with trains of thought often cut off mid-sentence. As the book progresses however, the style begins to mirror the content as the two languages bleed into each other and the eye is drawn to both.
In Other Words reads like a love story to a language, with Lahiri’s determination to master Italian evident. As she reads novels in Italian she underlines all the words on a page she doesn’t understand and then looks them up: “This task of mine, which is both obsessive and relaxing, takes time,” she says.
It is surely a commendable endeavour but at times it makes for a less-than-gripping subject. Lahiri can comes across as fanatical, and it is hard to be as taken with her subject as she is. The passages on dictionaries and translation feel repetitive. Her frustrations at not being taken seriously by Italians are understandable, though at the minor end of the disaster scale.
The book is more absorbing when Lahiri talks about language and creativity. The author of four acclaimed works of fiction, including her awardwinning debut collection Interpreter of Maladies and the Man Booker shortlisted The Lowland, Lahiri is a knowledgeable and insightful commentator on the power of words.
She notes similarities between the nuances and complexities of language and of life: “What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing”. For her, writing in Italian is like writing as a child again, without checks or criticism. Great works can be created out of the void, the uncertainty: “Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity”.
Also published this month by Bloomsbury is Lahiri’s thought- provoking, pamphlet-sized book on the importance of covers, The Clothing of Books. Readers may baulk at the €11.80 price tag for so slight a publication, though in keeping with the topic it is a beautifully presented book in a duck-egg colour with gold lettering.
There are plenty of interesting insights within as Lahiri considers the art of the book jacket from the perspective of both writer and reader. As she glimpses the contrasting worlds of art and marketing, text and image, designer and author, she is most vivid on her own books. For Lahiri, a cover marks the birth of the book, but also the end of creative endeavour.
Torn between the powerful identity given to covers belonging to an editorial series, “the effect of the uniform”, and the uniqueness of each book in its own right, she explores how identity is at once individual and collective.
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