“In Other Words” is, sadly, a less ecstatic experience for you and me. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. 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,” she writes. Lahiri she speaks of it as one speaks of an intense sexual affair. Learning to read and write in Italian has clearly been an invigorating experience for Ms. For English-language readers, this book has taken the long way home. She has written it in a third and only recently mastered language, Italian, and has had it rendered back into English by Ann Goldstein, the gifted translator of Elena Ferrante and Primo Levi. Bravely, it does so from an outpost of further exile. It’s a slim memoir that examines her long sense of lexical displacement. She learned English while young (she was raised in Rhode Island) and in it has written four authoritative works of fiction, including “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Born in London to Indian immigrants, her first language was Bengali. Jhumpa Lahiri is one of literature’s linguistic nomads.
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