Jhumpa

Jhumpa Lahiri is an Anglo-Bengali writer (see the review of *The Namesake* on this website); captivated by the Italian language, she has performed "a kind of reverse game" (as she writes in the foreword): translating an anthology of short stories from our literature into English, and subsequently presenting that same anthology to the Italian public. The authors, some renowned and others less so, are examined through the magnifying glass of a foreigner, of a writer with her own distinct interpretive and literary imprint. The selection is vast: 40 authors presented in alphabetical order, from Elio Vittorini to Corrado Alvaro, in an innovative departure from the chronological criterion typically adopted by anthologies. Despite the extensive time span, from Giovanni Verga's *Fantasticheria*, published in 1880, to *Controtempo* > by Antonio Tabucchi from 2009, Lahiri sends us an important message: literature is timeless, the social and literary context does not matter; it is what is said and how it is said that must hold value for us. And so a curiosity arises: what holds value for Lahiri? To attempt to understand this, we can start with an Italian writer who is now forgotten. In an exquisite story, *La noce d'oro* > , Cristina Campo brings to light moments of her childhood and draws us into the origins of her passion for fairy tales and mysteries. Delving into her grandmother’s books, there appears before the young Cristina's fertile imagination a setting of tender funereal gloom where wasp-waisted princesses appeared to wear corsets and perhaps even hairpieces, in vast, gloomy-grey palaces. (...) I discovered then, with a shudder, that those fateful places and characters were not, all things considered, different from the yellowed and unsettling cabinet photographs of my grandmother as a young woman and of other beautiful dead kinswomen which my mother, in green leather cases, always carried with her on her travels > . What difference, then, is there between the realm of fairy tales and the real world? None; it is like visiting one's dead at the cemetery and discovering, stunned and frightened, the marvel: the ciphered names, the hieroglyphic inscriptions were suddenly replaced, on the soft marble, by their names, my very own, the ones I myself wore around my neck on the gold medallion. (...) The fairy tale was there, terrible and radiant, resolved for a moment and irresolvable: the eternal one, ever-returning in dreams, a viaticum for pilgrimage, a golden walnut to keep in the mouth, to crush between the teeth in the moment of extreme danger > . Literature is that golden walnut which, blending fantasy and reality, shields us from the thought of Death. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa had only a few months left to live when he wrote a disquieting story of rare elegance: *La sirena*. The narrator, the sole "surviving specimen" > of an ancient Sicilian family, meets in Turin a fellow countryman, the most illustrious Hellenist of his time. He manages to win the eminent professor's confidence, to the point of being invited to his home. Here he discovers that the elderly scholar lives alone and has never associated with the opposite sex, despite having been a young man of extraordinary beauty, a kind of Greek god. What are the reasons for a misogyny pursued throughout an entire lifetime? As in *The Thousand and One Nights* > (see the review on this website), we enter a literary matryoshka that leads us into a legendary mythological tale set within a prosaic bourgeois narrative. On a beach of rare beauty, before a pure expanse of sea, the professor, still young, declaimed aloud the verses of the poets, and the names of those forgotten Gods, ignored by most, once again brushed the surface of that sea which once, at their mere sound, would rise in turmoil or calm into stillness > . And as if the ancient tongue, recited by the young Hellenist, had revived the wonders of myth and sorcery, a Siren emerged: lying on her back, her head rested on her crossed hands; with calm shamelessness she showed the delicate down under her armpits, her parted breasts, her perfect belly; from her rose what I have clumsily called a perfume, a magical scent of the sea, of youthful voluptuousness." And the Siren said to him, "You are young and handsome, you should follow me now into the sea and escape pain, escape old age. (...) I have loved you and, remember, when you are weary, when you can bear no more, you need only lean out over the sea and call me: I will always be there, for I am everywhere, and your dream of slumber will come true > . There is, then, somewhere within our own imagination, a lifeline against suffering and Death. It may be a fleeting encounter with a gentleman that makes us dream, as occurs in *La signora* > by Lalla Romano, or it could be a hybrid creature, like the Centaur, whose unrequited love unleashes his fury (see Primo Levi's *Questio de Centauris* > ), or, finally, escape from grief might reside in an ancestral and ill-fated affection for a young doe, as in the story *La cerbiatta* by Grazia Deledda. As we read in the magnificent tale "The Porter and the Ladies" from *The Thousand and One Nights*, > all that you see us do, all that you observe around us... do not seek to understand the reason for it . The selection of stories and authors is intensely personal; fortunately, Lahiri did not study Italian literature from the critical handbooks of our homegrown professors. Instead, she allowed herself to be guided by curiosity, by even serendipitous recommendations, and by a very distinct taste regarding who and what ought to be read. With this approach, a literature emerges that is markedly different from the one we studied: off to the scrapheap with supposed verismo and neorealism; a welcoming embrace for ambiguous, fantastical, and far-fetched tales; and a rediscovery of authors—both male and female—who had been neglected or even ill-treated. Some writers emerge as not so timely or vital (consider the celebrated *Un marziano a Roma* by Ennio Flaiano), while others return to the fore, such as Fabrizia Ramondino with her story *La Torre*. Why read it? An engaging and innovative survey of Italian literature.

> Transform yourself into words: (...) if running around a single name it is always you and me at stake and always the same the potent weapons of mourning and affliction that even in dreams chase my smoothness to ruin (Cosimo Ortesta, from *Il progetto di un freddo perenne*, 1988). Reading this novel brought this line of Ortesta’s to mind: names follow us throughout our existence, speaking of ourselves, of the bond we share with others, and of all the feelings, even painful ones, we carry with us; as Lahiri writes, “names die over time, they perish with people.” Gogol is the son of a Bengali couple who moved to the United States; the name was bestowed upon him at birth while awaiting the “true > name that was supposed to arrive from India, but never did: a pet name, then, chosen by his father out of his passion for Russian writers. Gogol hates even signing his name at the bottom of his drawings in art class. He hates that it is at once absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is—that is, neither Indian nor American, but above all not Russian > . Being named Gogol is the mark of his ambiguity, of an identity suspended between two worlds, two different cultures, histories, and traditions. And Gogol attempts to break free from this indeterminacy, to escape the name, stubbornly pursuing separation from his parents and from the large, noisy, crowded Bengali community, with its clothing, cuisine, customs, and language—strenuously defended precisely because they live far from their homeland. He is weary of returning to Calcutta to visit relatives, a journey so eagerly anticipated by his parents. And above all, he no longer wants to be called Gogol. He goes to study far from home, earns a degree in architecture, finds work in another city, changes his name to Nikhil. The protagonist's attitude does not shift even when he learns the true reasons that led his father to give him that pet name. One evening, the train bringing Nikhil home is severely delayed. His father waits for him at the station in a state of great anxiety: he reveals to him that he named him Gogol because, as a young man, he was one of the few survivors of a catastrophic train accident; the book by the great Russian writer had saved him. Is this what you think of when you think of me, Gogol asks him, Do I remind you of that night? Not at all, his father says at last, with a hand on the boy’s hip, an accustomed gesture that had embarrassed Gogol up until that moment. You remind me of everything that followed > , that is, of family, work, and hard-won prosperity; and the name bestowed upon his son holds many meanings, not least what Dostoevsky said: we all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat > . The enigmatic phrase cannot yet be understood by young Nikhil, who resumes his flight from his roots. He meets Maxine, a classic daughter of the upper-middle-class liberal > , with beautiful homes, beautiful objects, solid points of reference. A guest at the house where Maxine’s parents—so cultivated and accommodating—spend their holidays, by the shores of a splendid lake amid woods and green meadows, Gogol understands that this is a place that will always be here for her. It makes it easy to imagine Maxine's past, her future, to picture in his mind her growing old. (...) Through the windows, he sees that dawn is slowly emerging in the sky, only a few stars are still visible, the silhouettes of the surrounding trees and buildings gradually become distinguishable. A bird begins to sing. And then he remembers that his parents cannot reach him: he hasn't given them the phone number. (...) And here beside Maxine, in this welcoming wilderness, he feels free. > The flight is cut short when his father suddenly dies. The rush to the morgue, the identification, gathering the few possessions his father had with him, the return home to his now-solitary mother, the Indian funeral rites surrounded by the entire Bengali community, brutally pull Gogol back to his condition of being neither Indian nor American, nor even Russian. Maxine invites him on a vacation together (because it might do you good (...) to get away from all this”); Nikhil replies to her: “I don’t want to get away > . And just like that, he is Gogol once more; he lets his mother guide him into a marriage with a Bengali girl, in a lavish and crowded ceremony he would have scornfully refused only a short time before. Reclaiming one's identity is not so simple. We cannot delve deeply into the story of the girl Gogol marries—a tale within the tale. We can only outline a few fundamental traits: she has a name unpronounceable in American and is therefore called by a pet name; she too fled her family, went to Paris where she acquired a third language (neither American nor Bengali), returned to the United States to teach French literature at university, surrounds herself with refined intellectuals (so removed from Gogol’s straightforward technical background), has had many men, betrays Nikhil, returns to Paris. Gogol is a romantic, and as such engages in a love affair—intense at least for him—genuinely believing he has found solid roots in a modern Anglo-Bengali family. The betrayal and separation abruptly throw him back into a state of limbo. He wonders how his parents managed, leaving behind their respective families, seeing them so rarely, without a place to reunite, in a perennial state of waiting, of nostalgia. (...) Gogol knows that his parents lived their lives in America despite what they lacked, with a strength he fears he does not possess.” What's in a name? Shakespeare wonders in *Romeo and Juliet*: “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet > . The novel does not tell us whether Juliet is right. In the old house his mother is vacating to move to Calcutta, Gogol finds the stories of the great Russian writer once again: a book his father had given him as a teenager, which he had abandoned on the shelf with a mixture of indifference and annoyance. And he finds a dedication: the man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.” Here is Dostoevsky’s enigma: “the name he had so detested was hidden and preserved here. (...) Those who had given and preserved the name of Gogol were far from him now. One dead, the other, a widow, on the verge of a different kind of departure, to live filled with nostalgia, like his father, in a world apart. (...) Once or twice a week he will hear the name Gogol over the telephone wires, or written on a screen. (...) Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he lives, Gogol Ganguli, once and for all, will vanish from the lips of those who love him, and so, cease to exist. It is an intense and complex novel: fluid, elegant prose, a spasmodic attention to detail. Places, objects, food, clothing are meticulously described, unlike the characters, who are not treated superficially, but rather deliberately kept always waiting” for something else, or yearning with nostalgia for something else. The author seems to be saying: everything is vacuous except places, naturalistically rendered yet rich in myth, suggestion, transmitters of values and worlds. At times one loses the thread of the plot, but what does it matter? The allure resides in the writing, and it is up to the reader to reassemble and interpret the whole. Why read it? A masterpiece, fascinating and dense with meaning and resonance.