In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

This book took me a few hours to read. I would have been done sooner but days of little sleep caught up and I needed a short rest from the words on the page for my very tired eyes.
This book has both the English and Italian inside. On the right hand pages is the English translation, not done by Jhumpa by the way and she explains why in the book. On the left hand pages are her words in Italian.

As in her novels, here Jhumpa writes about identity, finding ones self, alienation, and belonging.

At a certain point in her life she realized she didn't belong to any place, she called herself and exile. She didn't feel like she fit in with India, the home country of her parents, and the language spoken by them, Bengali. Her physical appearance kept her at arms distance from the country she grew up in, America. And the same physicality made her an outsider in Italy. She writes about how much better her Italian is than her husband's but that she is always treated as if she shouldn't be speaking it. It was an emotional thing to go through. Yet writing in, reading in, and speaking Italian was what she set out to do. And so she and her family moved for a time to Italy.

This book is born of that and what it really ends up being is a love letter to words, to language, to seeing yourself in the words. Words have power, I truly believe that and try to be mindful go how I wield that power. Jhumpa I think from having read this and her fiction works as well, she seems to agree and understand that. I was moved by her openness and sharing. And she just writes so darn beautifully.


My dear, dear friend Beth, who introduced me to Jhumpa Lahiri's writing, handed me Interpreter of Maladies and said to me, I never wanted to eat words until I read this book. I was hooked. And today when I told Beth about this book she said "I have never fallen in love with someone I didn't know" until Jhumpa. I agree. It is hard not to love Jhumpa!!!

This is a quote from the book and really captures the feelings and ideas within:

"What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable."


(Finished July 8, 2017)

Her other works:
The Namesake
Unaccustomed Earth
interpreter of maladies
The Lowland