If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
Jhumpa LahiriRead
I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of translating and reading Italian literature to appreciate its diverse voices.
Jhumpa Lahiri expresses her desire for greater accessibility to Italian literature in the English-speaking world. By mentioning extraordinary writers like Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola, Beppe Fenoglio, and Giorgio Manganelli, she highlights the richness and diversity found in Italian literary works, suggesting that these voices should be celebrated and understood by a broader audience.
In practice
Using this quote during a book club discussion focused on international literature.
If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.
I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.
The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.
On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.
No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth...all those glorious words.
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