In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. As if I were studying a musical instrument without ever playing it. But I don’t like the silence, the isolation of the self-teaching process. I manage to memorize some conjugations, do some exercises. Having studied Latin for many years, I find the first chapters of this textbook fairly easy. As if it were possible to learn on your own. It’s called “Teach Yourself Italian.” An exhortatory title, full of hope and possibility. How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine? That I don’t know? Maybe because I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language. Almost as soon as we met, Italian and I were separated. (Feb.As for Italian, the exile has a different aspect.
This is what she tells listeners during the English chapters that open the book, but the truth of it is not apparent until they hear the story told all over again in the language of her choosing. It’s not just that her accent is flawless but that Italian allows her access to a more avid, colorful, uninhibited version of herself. Speaking in Italian, however, her voice takes on added depth and fervor. Her emotional register feels monochromatic even when she is giving voice to her deepest longings, and the performance falls flat, particularly during the very short pieces of fiction she weaves in: every character sounds the same.
In English, Lahiri makes for a quiet and unassuming narrator. In the print version of this memoir, which Lahiri wrote in Italian, Lahiri’s Italian words and their English translation are side by side on facing pages here, she narrates the entire memoir in English before doing it all over again in Italian, starting in the third compact disc. She tells of her initial passion for learning Italian, her third language after Bengali and English, and her decision to move her husband and two children to Rome for the full experience. Lahiri, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of Interpreter of Maladies, tries her hand at memoir-and audiobook narration-with this brief recounting of her quest to immerse herself in the Italian language.
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