Dove mi trovo (Italian Edition)

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I was mostly left with this agonizing question: Will we never get to read another Interpreter of Maladies or Unaccustomed Earth? Un perfetto esempio di finzione "flash" come quelle storie che appaiono nel "New Yorker Magazine" durante l'estate. It is more like the character owe each of these characters something but she never demanded from them. Il vocabolario e la sua poetica sono particolari, quasi insoliti; la struttura lessicale è inconsueta per un libro scritto in italiano (non tradotto) e molto stimolante.

She enjoys walking in her neighborhood and associating with others for a short time, but then needs to go back to her routine, quiet life. Virtually every chapter title is a place--from a bar, post office, on a train she ponders her relationships with others. Though I love Lahiri and highly recommend her short stories, I continue to struggle with her longer form narratives. But because the story is deliberately vague, a sort of build-up game is offered to its readers who are invited to make what they want of its missing details, reasons and possibilities. The writing was flat, the descriptions fairly dull and the narrator's observations fell between the clichéd and the pedestrian.Her debut, internationally-bestselling collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. This weekend this enlightening article was kindly brought to my attention, in which she elaborates on the origin of this book and announces she has finished writing a collection of short stories (in Italian) and that her first book of poetry - also in Italian - will be published in June - which I thought exciting news, as in the process of learning Italian myself. This book is beyond beautiful, the writing is precise, moving, and gives you this calming effect that you are exactly where you need to be.

La scrittura è delicatissima, da italiana, capisco questo suo ricercare sintatticamente parola per parola. I’ve been writing in Italian for almost two years and I feel that I’ve been transformed, almost reborn. She describes herself as “ Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. There are a few poetic prose passages I savored, but on the whole I felt that some of her linguistic brilliance, so evident in English, is missing here as she is still in the process of perfecting Italian. You can spot such books because they are praised as “exquisitely nuanced,” and they are exceedingly tedious.

Lahiri’s double-translated words (Italian to English by her, English to Greek in my own mind) had an even more soothing and satisfactory effect the second time around! It was as if at every chapter the curtains opened and I could get some insight into the mind and soul of this woman in a foreign city. The specificity of the location is juxtaposed with the meanderings of the narrator’s mind which jumps between the past and the present.

While I can’t say whether Lahiri always articulated phrases like an Italian would, I didn’t notice any Englishism on her part.

In its starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote, "Lahiri's poetic flourishes and spare, conversational prose are on full display. Even though I can't draw, I'd like one of those sketchbooks, hand bound with thick cream-colored paper.