Gradually the notes became sentences, and the sentences paragraphs. It was a sort of diary, written without forethought. I had been keeping another Italian diary, in which I described my daily life, my impressions of Rome. Here, instead, I described only the emotions inspired by the linguistic drive.
By spring I had filled up the notebook. The head had met the tail. I bought a new notebook, and put the first one away in a drawer. I continued to study Italian, but I stopped recording my thoughts backward. The following autumn I picked up the first notebook. I found a hodgepodge of thoughts, some sixty disorganized pages. At that point I had written just a few things in Italian and had shown them to a couple of friends. But I had no desire to share the contents of the notebook with anyone.
Here are some notes from the last page, which was also the first.
“language like a tide, now a flood, now low, inaccessible”
“reading with a dictionary”
“failure”
“something that remains forever outside me”
Rereading the notes, I almost immediately glimpsed a thread, a logic, perhaps even a narrative arc. One day, to better understand their meaning, I took notes on the earlier notes. I saw that there were points to develop, to analyze. Chapters, titles came to mind. I sensed a pace, a structure. In a short time I knew that the contents of the first notebook would become this book.
I needed more space. I bought an exercise book. More or less every week, from November to May, I worked on a different idea until I got to the last one. I had never before written anything in this rapid, farsighted manner, knowing already almost every step ahead of me, aware already of where the path would lead. In spite of the effort, the process of writing was fluid, immediate. Everything was extraordinarily clear, except the central element, except the subject itself: language.
How to define this book? It’s the fifth I’ve written. It’s also a debut. It’s a point of arrival and of departure. It’s based on a lack, an absence. Starting with the title, it implies a rejection. This time I don’t accept the words I already know, the ones I should be writing with. I look for others.
I think it’s a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured.
It’s a travel book, more interior, I would say, than geographic. It recounts an uprooting, a state of disorientation, a discovery. It recounts a journey that is at times exciting, at times exhausting. An absurd journey, given that the traveler never reaches her destination.
It’s a book of memory, full of metaphors. It recounts a search, a victory, a continual defeat. Childhood and adulthood, an evolution, maybe a revolution. It’s a book of love, of suffering. It recounts a new independence together with a new dependence. A collaboration, and also a state of solitude.
Unlike my other books, this one is rooted in my real, lived experiences. Apart from two stories, it’s not a work of imagination. I consider it a sort of linguistic autobiography, a self-portrait. It seems fitting to cite Natalia Ginzburg, who, in the foreword to Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings), writes, “I have invented nothing.”
And yet, from another point of view, I have invented everything. Writing in a different language means starting from zero. It comes from a void, and so every sentence seems to have emerged from nothingness. The effort of making the language mine, of possessing it, has a strong resemblance to a creative process — mysterious, illogical. But the possession is not authentic: it, too, is a sort of fiction. The language is true, but the manner in which I absorb and use it seems false. A vocabulary that is sought-after, acquired, remains forever anomalous, as if it were counterfeit, even though it’s not.
In learning Italian I learned, again, to write. I had to adopt a different approach. At every step the language confronted me, constrained me. At the same time it allowed me to rebel, to go beyond. Here is Natalia Ginzburg again, in Family Sayings:
“I don’t know if it’s the best of my books, but certainly it’s the only book that I wrote in a state of absolute freedom.”
I think that my new language, more limited, more immature, gives me a more extensive, more adult gaze. That’s the reason I continue, for now, to write in Italian. In this book, I’ve talked quite a bit about the paradoxical relationship between freedom and limits. I don’t want to repeat myself here. I would prefer to examine further the interconnection between reality and invention, and clarify the question of autobiography, a question that has been hanging over me for many years.
In the beginning I wrote in order to conceal myself. I wanted to stay far from my writing, withdraw into the background. I preferred to hide between the lines, a disguised, oblique presence.
I became a writer in America, but I set my first stories in Calcutta, a city where I have never lived, far from the country where I grew up, and which I knew much better. Why? Because I needed distance between me and the creative space.
When I began to write, I thought that it was more virtuous to talk about others. I was afraid that autobiographical material was of less creative value, even a form of laziness on my part. I was afraid that it was egocentric to relate one’s own experiences.
In this book I am the protagonist for the first time. There is not even a hint of another. I appear on the page in the first person, and speak frankly about myself. A little like Matisse’s “Blue Nudes,” groups of cutout, reassembled female figures, I feel naked in this book, pasted to a new language, disjointed.
I haven’t read what people write about me for years. I know, however, that certain readers consider me an autobiographical writer. If I explain that I’m not, they don’t believe it; they insist. They say the fact that I am a person of Indian origin, like the majority of my characters, makes my work openly autobiographical. Or they think that any story in the first person must be true.
For me an autobiographical text is one that is shaped by the writer’s own experiences, and in which there is little distance between the life of the writer and the events of the book. Every writer tends to describe the world, the people he knows. But an autobiographical work goes a step further. Alberto Moravia was from Rome, so he set many of his stories in Rome. He was Roman, like many of his characters. Does that mean, then, that every one of his stories, every one of his novels, is autobiographical? I don’t think so.
I spent more than a year promoting my last novel, The Lowland. I don’t share the experiences of the characters in that novel. What happens to them never happened to me. I know the main places in the book, and the plot is based on a real episode, but I have no memory or impression of it. Reality provided the seeds. I imagined the rest.
More than once I’ve been confronted by a journalist or critic who maintains that I’ve written an autobiographical novel. And every time it amazes me, and also irritates me, that a novel whose plot and characters I completely invented is considered autobiographical.
It’s not for me to evaluate my books. I would like simply to distinguish between a realistic novel, created out of the knowledge and curiosity of the author, and one that is autobiographical.
In Other Words is different. Almost everything in it happened to me. I’ve already explained that it began as a sort of diary, a personal text. It remains my most intimate book but also the most open.
Even my first attempt at fiction in Italian, “The Exchange,” is autobiographical, I can’t deny that. It’s a story told in the third person, but the protagonist, slightly changed, is me. I went that rainy afternoon to that apartment. I saw and observed everything that I describe. Like the protagonist, I lost a black sweater, I reacted badly. I was bewildered, uneasy, like her. A few months later I transformed the raw experience into a story. “Half-Light,” written almost two years later, is an invented story, but it also has an autobiographical basis: the dream of the protagonist that begins the story comes from me.