[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to highlight books I’m looking forward to
checking out. That means I’ll have less to say about them, of course—but I hope
you’ll share your thoughts on these and/or your own Beach Read recommendations
for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll go great with suntan lotion and iced
beverages!]
Two reasons I’m
excited for Jhumpa Lahiri’s first nonfiction book, and why I’m somehow not quite
sure.
1)
It’s Jhumpa Lahiri!: I’ve written
a good bit about Lahiri in
this space, and for good reason: she’s one of my favorite contemporary
authors, wrote a novel (The Namesake)
that teaches
as well as any book I’ve encountered to date, and is just prodigiously
talented and interesting and thematically all the way up my alley and etc. Any
new book by someone who fits all those criteria is welcome news, and likely to
end up in my beach bag.
2)
Cross-Cultural Multi-Lingual Goodness: The
specific subject of Lahiri’s book is her lifelong and evolving relationship
with Italian, her third language (after the Hindi of her parents’ homeland
and the English of her own) and one in
which the book itself is written (along with an accompanying English translation
on every page). If you’re saying, “Ben, that sounds like somehow created a book
designed to fit your ideas of cross-cultural
and multi-lingual
American identity,” well, you’re not wrong.
3)
And Yet: Ever since I heard about this new book
of Lahiri’s, I’ve been somewhat more bothered by the idea of it than those
reasons would indicate. Partly I imagine that’s about expectations—I love
Lahiri’s fiction, both short and long, and was hoping her new publication would
offer more of it. And partly, as best I can psychoanalyze myself, I think it’s
about my hesitations with what I might call self-aggrandizing memoirs—the kinds
that offer
up the writer’s life and perspective as models for others to emulate. But I
don’t know that Lahiri’s is one of those—and I do know, per reasons 1 and 2,
that there will be a lot to like in it in any case!
Next prospective
Beach Read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this book? Other Beach Reads you’d share?
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