Tender and yet obstinate, Jhumpa takes on the challenge of writing in Italian, a second language learned in adulthood, while living abroad and exploring her lifelong relationship to foreignness, as a Bangladeshi-American, for whom language has always been a source of alienation, an in-between place of approximation.

Like her Italian literary hero, Italo Calvino, who said that he is only “comfortable in places where he is a foreigner”, and Czech immigrant writer Milan Kundera, who chose to write his fictional vignettes in French as an adult emigre — the reader gets snapshots of Jhumpa’s journey, undertaken in soft dialogue with the exiled minds on her bookshelf, as she candidly grapples with her words, the tools of her trade, like a child again, portraying the kind of everyday wrestling that brings her back to the feelings of growing up as a second generation immigrant in America, helping her parents with words — to discover with each verbal conquest, that new language ripens the fruit of new self. What a pleasure!