RaveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)... the product of a becoming which refracts life through the medium of a new linguistic lens ... What Lahiri has written are short auto-ethnographic accounts; the scholar of the self makes an observation and tries to grapple with the history that she brings to it ... There is something of Lahiri’s own becoming to be glimpsed in this character, which is unlike any other in her literary oeuvre ... this new voice and preoccupation with Italy does not feel like a betrayal because Lahiri’s stories have always been equal parts zeitgeist and augury, showing us around and mapping the terrain ahead at the same time ... an intertextual ode to the vicissitudes of life, a culmination of inner and outer geographies which Lahiri maps as she mingles her history with this new literary community. By journeying to the inside of a language and its places, Lahiri has brought back a new lens from which to address the lacunae of intimacy and identity that have always charged the lives of her characters ... an explicit refusal to conform and Lahiri’s extended allegory about departure, wandering, and a dawning of wisdom about the self who we can never truly escape.
