In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri; trans. by Ann Goldstein, book review

Jhumpa Lahiri explores the writing process as she attempts to learn Italian

The importance of exile: Jhumpa Lahiri (Marco Delogu)

I began reading Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words on an aeroplane as I flew to Italy. The blurb claims that the book is about exile and belonging, about "a writer's obsession for another language" and the process of learning to express oneself in it. It is presented in the form of a parallel text in Italian and English. In Other Words is indeed all these things.

The book opens with the author attempting to swim across a hidden lake described in Dantesque terms; the deep, dark water, the silent wood, the halfway journey that reminds me of the Inferno and also of Lake Avernus, over which no bird can fly. As the plane crosses the Channel, I settle down to read what I imagine is a romantic story of learning the Italian language.

Seeing a scrap of paper that says "imparare l'italiano" (learn Italian), the writer begins a journey into the interior of her chosen language. Wandering first through the narrow crowded streets of Florence, taking lessons in the US and finally spending a whole year in Rome, she makes lists of Italian words in notebooks, learns the correct way to use the simple present, the perfect and the imperfect and struggles to think in Italian. So far, so good.

Slowly and painfully, she begins to read, wholly dependent on teachers and friends who correct her mistakes and encourage her along the way. She dreams of a day when she will no longer need a dictionary, and is constantly confused and unsettled by the monumental nature of her task – to write in Italian, to speak the language and to live within it.

We follow her as she completes one grammatical exercise after another. Inevitably, she feels a sense of exile for, without language, isolation is not far away. In fact, Lahiri already feels an exile twice removed and on the margins of two languages, Bengali and English. Now she is attempting a third. Why? She struggles to answer the question.

"How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine?" she asks. Is it "because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language"?

I am halfway across France by now and I understand the author's obsessions; indeed, I too have been in the place she describes. Yet I feel there is something more beneath this text that needs uncovering. So absorbed have I been in Lahiri's discourse on belonging and exile, her all-too-familiar struggle with verbs and vocabulary, that I have missed what is both elusive and important. Engrossed, I haven't noticed the snow-covered Alps ahead. Italy approaches.

Now I reread the first story Lahiri wrote in Italian. The Exchange is about a black sweater, lost and then found. Lahiri thinks the sweater is a metaphor for the new language that is transforming her. I go back a few pages and examine another of her comments: "buried under all the rough spots is something precious. A new voice, crude but alive..."

This voice belongs, of course, to the artist as she struggles painfully to shift from one creative medium to another. For reasons unknown even to themselves, some writers are compelled to switch media in this way in an act both difficult and mystifying to others. Full of self-doubt, Lahiri has first to master her new craft. Her scaffolding – the ebb and flow of syntax and vocabulary – are the equivalent of paints and canvas. The work produced in Italian is different, but the hand that fashions it remains the same.

Lahiri has written an astonishingly sincere book on the mechanics and mystery that surrounds the creative process. As my plane begins its descent into a sunlit Italy, the fact that Italian isn't her native language seems largely irrelevant. For isn't exile of some sort the artist's constant bedfellow?

Roma Tearne is a painter and novelist. Her latest novel is 'The Last Pier', published by Gallic Books

Bloomsbury, £16.99. Order at £14.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop