What I'm Reading: An Odd Pairing of Fiction and Non

Sarah Manguso's LIARS & Jhumpa Lahiri's IN OTHER WORDS

What I’m Reading is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering brief excerpts from contemporary novels and story collections you’ll want to add to your TBR pile.

I should probably change that little intro, since so much of what I’ve been reading—and writing—these days is nonfiction. I’m also usually a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader, but Covid and a host of other distractions lands me in the middle of two this week, along with a plug for the last book I finished: Joan Didion’s final essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. The essays span from 1968 - 2000, and I tore through them all in a day. I especially enjoyed the last one, “Everywoman.com,” about Martha Stewart.

And now on to the books at hand. As I say, I’m in the middle of both, so my opinions aren’t fixed, but each has me engaged to a degree that encourages me to recommend them.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Sarah Manguso’s nonfiction, and though it feels strange to gush over an exploration of the devastating loss of a friend to suicide, The Guardians: An Elegy, is a brief yet profoundly affecting book that has had a deep influence on me as a writer. All of which is to say I was eager to read her latest novel, Liars, and the opening section below was so startling, I immediately fell into the book.

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In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.

Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.

But before all that, back at the beginning, I remember looking out the door of my apartment, watching John’s head appear as he climbed the stairs, and then, step by step, more and more of him.

Which is when I said, You’re real!

Which was my first mistake.

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If you’ve been around for a while, you know I loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent collection Roman Stories, and that I have a particular soft spot for the city of Florence, where my family lived for a year, in 1966, when I was ten years old. So it’s no surprise that I’d be enchanted with Lahiri’s memoir, In Other Words, about falling in love with the Italian language, moving her family to Rome, and beginning to read and write solely in Italian.

It’s over fifty years since I struggled to learn and became fluent in that language myself, and a year of college Italian didn’t really bring it back. Yet some comprehension remains, and I was delighted to discover that each short section appears in the original Italian on the left hand pages, while the English, translated by Ann Goldstein, occupies the right.

Here’s an excerpt from the third section titled “Love at First Sight.”

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In 1994, my sister and I decide to give ourselves a trip to Italy as a present, and we choose Florence. I’m in Boston, studying Renaissance architecture: Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel, the Laurentian Library of Michelangelo. We arrive in Florence at dusk, a few days before Christmas. My first walk is in the dark. I’m in an intimate, sober, joyful place. Shops decorated for the season. Narrow, crowded streets, some more like corridors that like streets. There are tourists like my sister and me, but not many. I see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping.

I’ve come for a week, to see the buildings, to admire the squares, the churches. But from the start my relationship with Italy is as auditory as it is visual. Although there aren’t many cars, the city is humming. I’m aware of a sound I like, of conversations, phrases, words that I hear wherever I go. As if the whole city were a theater in which a slightly restless audience is chatting before the show begins.

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You can find all the books I mentioned at the links below. Happy reading!
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
The Guardians: An Elegy
Liars
Roman Stories
In Other Words

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