Jhumpa Lahiri: belief

Transcript context

…And does it? Well, I actually haven’t read it yet. I would like to. I keep meaning to pick it up when I’m over there. But he was a colossal writer from Turin, that great literary city, where you have Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Einaudi (the publishing house), all concentrated in this part of Italy in the north over toward France. Pavese wrote very much in the autobiographical vein and did things that, again, I think now, “Oh, it’s fashionable when the writer becomes a character,” and “Oh, we all write about ourselves,” and there’re a lot of memoirs. But these are things that he was doing after World War II. He had a tragic life. He suffered deeply. He committed suicide. He left behind an incredible writer’s notebook that is an extraordinarily powerful work; very, very dark; very, very true. And wrote lots of short stories as well as a series of slim novels, and he worked really hard as a translator — not only his own translations of many American authors, had a very rich relationship with the English language — but also oversaw a lot of translation projects. He writes like an American writer in some ways.…

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