She recounts all the various hurdles with honesty, sometimes frustration, often with love. In this engaging memoir, Lahiri outlines her struggles to be a true speaker, and writer, of the language, and questions herself constantly, outlining her reasons and her shortfalls. Writing in Italian, she lacked the authority she exercised in English, the thorough knowledge and context of correct vocabulary usage, the subtle distinctions between the various tenses and other complexities of language. Despite teaching herself Italian with native speakers near her home in Brooklyn and her immersion in the language when in Rome – becoming fluent – writing in the language was another matter.

Of course the hurdles Lahiri faced were great. She wanted to learn Italian and even moved to Rome, family and all, where she embarked on the task of writing a book in the language. Lahiri was already an established, award-winning writer in English – best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies and for the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lowland.

I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language.” Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. “When you’re in love, you want to live forever.

Her passion for the language is expressed in sometimes extreme words: Why does Lahiri write in Italian? It starts as an idea and becomes yearning, and then takes over her life. This is what US writer Jhumpa Lahiri did and she outlines this journey in her beautiful memoir, In Other Words. Can you imagine? Teaching yourself a language from scratch and immersing yourself in it to the extent that you accomplish the mammoth task of writing a book in that language. Celebrated author Jhumpa Lahiri was obsessed, possessed even, by the Italian language.

Di fawley