Jhumpa Lahiri: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. And that’s a trilogy, right? Yeah, she wrote this trilogy and she wrote some other books too. She was Hungarian and left during the invasion, fled to Switzerland with her small kids, her husband, and her dictionaries. And writes about this in an amazing little book called The Illiterate, “La analfabeta.” I read it in Italian; it must be called something else in French: “L’analphabete.” But she taught herself how to write in French and all of her literary work is in French. I came to her in Italian. So I came to her in translation but not in an English translation, in Italian translation, and my life was never the same after reading her. She’s one of those writers — you just remain forever altered. Extraordinarily powerful, a deep, profound, profound writer. Dark but very human and the kind of stuff that you don’t find very easily. She is inspiring to me, deeply, because of this incredible effort she made her whole life to try to express herself in a learned language. Of course the difference between her and myself is that she always had an antagonistic relationship with French, even though she went out of her way to learn it and to express herself in it because she was living in Switzerland, and she felt that she couldn’t really function as a writer without expressing herself in French. Whereas I’ve gone out of my way to do this crazy thing that everyone discourages me from doing, which is writing in Italian. And you were fascinated with Italy way back when, right? For a long time.…

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