In Other Words (25 page)

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.

I used to think that making things up, rather than drawing directly on reality, would give me more creative autonomy. I preferred to manipulate the truth, but I also wanted to represent it faithfully, authentically. Verisimilitude was very important to me, as a writer. After writing this book I changed my mind.

Invention can also be a trap. A character fabricated out of nothing has to seem like a real person—there's the challenge. It was a challenge, especially in
The Lowland,
to
portray a real place where I have never lived, and to evoke a historical era that I didn't know. I did a lot of research to make that world, that time, believable. Beginning with my first book I evoked Calcutta, my parents' native city. Because it was, for them, a far-off place that had almost disappeared, I was looking for a way, through writing, to bridge the distance, and to make it present.

Today I no longer feel bound to restore a lost country to my parents. It took me a long time to accept that my writing did not have to assume that responsibility. In that sense
In Other Words
is the first book I've written as an adult, but also, from the linguistic point of view, as a child.

I continue, as a writer, to seek the truth, but I don't give the same weight to factual truth. In Italian I'm moving toward abstraction. The places are undefined, the characters so far are nameless, without a particular cultural identity. The result, I think, is writing that is freed in certain ways from the concrete world. I now construct a less specific setting. That's why I understand Matisse, when he compared his new technique to the experience of flight. Writing in Italian, I feel that my feet are no longer on the ground.

What drove me to take a new direction, toward writing that is both more autobiographical and more abstract? It's a contradiction in terms, I realize. Where does the more personal perspective originate, along with a vaguer tonality? It must be the language. In this book language is not only the tool but the subject. Italian remains the mask, the filter, the outlet, the means. The detachment without which I can't create anything. And it's this new detachment that helps me show my face.

I have an ambivalent relationship with this book, and probably always will. On the one hand I'm proud of it. I traveled far to get here. I earned every word: nothing about it was handed down. Everything derives from my determination. It was a risky procedure. That I was able to conceive, draft, prepare the pages for publication seems a miracle. I consider it an authentic book, because it's sincere, honest.

On the other hand I fear that it's a false book. I'm insecure about it, a little embarrassed. Although it now has a cover, a binding, a physical presence, I'm afraid it's frivolous, even presumptuous. I don't know if continuing to write in Italian is the right path. My Italian remains a work in progress, and I remain a foreigner. I came to Italy partly to know my characters better, my parents. I didn't expect to become a foreigner as a writer, too.

It's interesting, now that the book is about to come out, to hear some of the reactions. When I say that my new book is written in Italian, I am often regarded, mainly by other writers, with suspicion, almost with disapproval. Maybe I'm wrong; I wonder if it will be considered a dead end, or, at best, “a pleasant distraction.” Some say to me that a writer should never abandon his or her dominant language for one that is known only superficially. They say that the disadvantages serve neither writer nor reader. When I hear these opinions I'm ashamed, and I have the impulse to erase every word.

It was only after writing this book that I discovered Ágota Kristóf, an author of Hungarian origin who wrote in French. Maybe it was best that I didn't know her voice and her works before—to have taken this step unaware of her example. I read, first of all, a brief autobiographical text,
The Illiterate,
in which she talks about her literary education and the experience of arriving in Switzerland, at twenty-one, as a refugee. She begins to learn French, a hard, demanding process. She writes: