When she travels to Kolkata, India, despite a lifelong proficiency with Bengali, vendors address her in English. The writer’s facility with Italian far outstrips her husband’s, but her appearance reads “foreign,” just as it did in Boston, where she once refused a flier, only to be cursed by a man who demanded to know if her problem was that she couldn’t speak English. When I do the same thing, the same people say, in English, ‘Nice to meet you.’” “For him, it’s enough to extend his hand, to say, ‘A pleasure, I’m Alberto.’ Because of his looks, because of his name, everyone thinks he’s Italian. Her husband, Alberto Vourvoulias, speaks the language with a Spanish accent. These started in a kindergarten doorway in Rhode Island, where she set aside the Bengali she spoke at home for “a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted.” How shocking when the tree bark made of this second language, her second skin, transformed her into a literary celebrity, including a National Humanities Medalist, awarded by President Obama at the White House in September.Īs Lahiri reports it, her escape into Italian hits a wall. Like Daphne fleeing Apollo, Lahiri tries to escape the embrace of English, the demands and separations it inflicted on her girlhood. The content of Ovid’s masterpiece also fits.

Normally, Lahiri explains, she is annoyed by the journalistic boilerplate of being asked her favorite book, but during her time in Rome, begun in 2012, she was “able to respond without any hesitation” that it was Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” She had read the entire poem in Latin as a young woman at Boston University, and that ecstatic experience feels like a reverb for Lahiri’s midlife task. “In Other Words” gives off the intoxication of metamorphosis, the title of one of her 24 chapters. The tone hasn’t a shred of the coquettish, nor is it monastic. Instead of “Eat, Pray, Love,” the reader finds a book situated in Italy without a single reference to food or prayer or sex. Lahiri’s sensibility exists in exquisite counterpoint to a culture besotted with selfies. It puts one in the company of a beautiful mind engaged in a sustained and bracing discipline.

Reading “In Other Words” is deeply pleasurable. Thus, as an adult, as a writer, I rediscover the pleasure of reading.” I can’t take for granted my ability to accomplish it. I find the process more demanding yet more satisfying, almost miraculous. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist.

In other words lahiri