Have always loved her work, which mostly revolve around Indian migrants. The mix of reality and fiction is what makes her characters come alive. This book however, is a memoir of sorts about her love affair with the Italian language. Her frustration that she would always be seen as an “outsider” no matter how fluently she speaks the language by virtue of her appearance. It also speaks of her struggles with being an “Italian” writer after having made a name for herself as an American writer. Read somewhere that picking up a language after the age of 10 means that it would be next to impossible for us to speak like a native. I wonder why sometimes we are attracted to a particular language. Is it the way the words sound, look, their structure, vocab, etc ? Lahiri was so enamoured with the language that she uprooted herself and moved to Italy, feeling depressed when she went back to America for a holiday because she was no longer surrounded by the sound of the language.
I enjoyed the little stories she included in the book- her first attempts at writing in Italian. She also spoke of how she was enthralled by the poetry of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (so that’s where Kafka snitched the title) when she first read it in Latin. Metamorphoses is considered an epic and borrows the Greek mythological characters like the Apollo. Lahiri recounts the story of how Apollo pursued Daphne and Daphne wanting to deflect his advances, morphed into a laurel tree in a forest where she had longed to be. In a sense, Daphne was free but not entirely so. Apollo on the other hand could touch Daphne but not own her. I think it’s kinda bittersweet.
On a side note, I’ve not been sleeping much ever since the return from the Philippines. Bad case of insomnia, not sure why. Have tried barring myself from the phone from 10pm onwards but doesn’t seem like it’s doing my sleep any good.
I wish and pray for an uninterrupted sleep. That’s all I want.
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