In the case of the written word, our spoken words often pale in comparison. It makes us aware of what can be done with words, even if most of us can’t pull it off ourselves. Sometimes language is alive, and its liveliness is something we sense when we encounter it. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, she has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.The Betrothed: A Novel, by Alessandro Manzoni, translated and with an introduction by Michael F. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers.
This is the first novel Jhumpa has written in Italian and translated into English. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will change. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits.
In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her.
We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father’s untimely death. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. “The marvelous new novel from the author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa’s first in nearly a decade.”Įxuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit.
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