If the process of writing is a dream, the book cover represents the awakening.
A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.
Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?
Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he’d once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace.
She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It’s a version of Bela’s definition, in childhood, of yesterday.
Personally, I think it deplorable to place the words and opinions of others on the book jacket. I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me.
In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.
Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch.
When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don’t like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I’d run into a boyfriend I’d tired of, someone I’d left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.
Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection? What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
The unknown words remind me that there’s a lot I don’t know in this world.
But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.
I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.
Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.
There’s no escape from the shadows that mount, inexorably, in this darkening season. Nor can we escape the shadows our families cast. That said, there are times I miss the pleasant shade a companion might provide.
In the pool I lose myself. My thoughts merge and flow. Everything – my body, my heart, the universe – seems tolerable when I’m protected by water and nothing touches me. All I think about is the effort. Below my body there’s a restless play of dark and light projected onto the bottom of the pool, that drifts away like smoke.
Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I’ve always understood this. It’s like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what’s left over before going to bed.
You, who chafed at the collective we created, who only wanted to subtract yourself, always, from the equation, throwing it off-balance.
Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.
Maladies, poorly interpreted, can’t be cured.