PositiveThe Telegraph India (IND)In a book that is deeply personal yet unaccountably opaque with regard to Lahiri’s self-production in language, this last piece is intense and absorbing ... But though there is much to interest us in the story of Lahiri’s love-affair with Italian (for me especially, as someone who loves the language but has never had the time or patience to learn it properly), the account is wearying in repetition ... this is a collection worth reading for a number of reasons. Most important for global literary consciousness is the link Lahiri instals between postcolonial linguistic choice and translation. The spare elegance of her account of linguistic remaking, and the scrupulous record of the pains and perils of self-translation, amplify contemporary anxieties.
Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein
PositiveThe Telegraph India (IND)... despite the performativity of its presentation, and the radical dissimulation of its print embodiment, In the Margins comes across as a painfully honest, even hesitant and reflexive, account of where Ferrante’s personal journey as a writer has taken her.
