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am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection? What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness.
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
Maternity is a visceral bond, an unconditional love, a devotion that goes beyond attraction and compatibility.
I am acutely conscious of a painful physical detachment. As if a part of me were missing.
I’m aware of the distance. Of an oppressive, intolerable silence.
words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets,
the light, the sky, the flowers, the sounds.
In this period of silence, of linguistic isolation, only a book can reassure me. Books are the best means—private, discreet, reliable—of overcoming reality.
it. As far as writing is concerned, I remain inactive. As if I were in a creative waiting room, all I do is wait.
Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere.
There is pain in every joy.
That’s how the wall works. Someone who doesn’t understand me can ignore me, doesn’t have to take account of me.
Such people look at me but don’t see me.
I write in order to break down the wall, to express myself in a pure way.
I become my words, and the words become me.
Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It’s a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.
I wanted to see a whole person, not a fragmented one. But that person wasn’t there.
I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language: to subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis.
favorite book was the Metamorphoses of Ovid.
I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.
Metamorphosis is a process that is both violent and regenerative, a death and a birth.
All my writing comes from a place where I feel invisible, inaccessible. But a year after my first book was published I lost my anonymity.
They don’t understand why I want to take such a risk.
These reactions don’t surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.
All my life I’ve tried to get away from the void of my origin.
I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us.
When a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly it’s no longer a caterpillar but a butterfly. The effect of the metamorphosis is radical, permanent.
creature has lost its old form and gained a new, almost unrecognizable one. It has new physical features, a new beauty, new capacities.
writing: they are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive.
Writers can’t avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there.
sondare means “to explore, to examine.”
the verb means “seek to know, to understand something, in particular the thoughts and intentions of others.”
I write to feel alone. Ever since I was a child it has been a way of withdrawing, of finding myself. I need silence and solitude.
and they always said the most important thing I needed to hear: keep going.
I imagined I would feel that sort of joy only once in my life.
I observed a surprising dialogue between negative and positive space. I understood how white space, like silence, can have a meaning.
yet they are harmonious, balanced. They express a new beginning.
How to define this book? It’s the fifth I’ve written. It’s also a debut. It’s a point of arrival and of departure.
themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging.
It recounts an uprooting, a state of disorientation, a discovery.
journey that is at times exciting, at times exhausting.
book of memory, full of metaphors.
a book of love, of suffering.
rooted in my real, lived experiences.
linguistic autobiography, a self-portrait.
“I have invented nothing.”
Writing in a different language means starting from zero.
the only book that I wrote in a state of absolute freedom.”
relationship between freedom and limits.
In this book I am the protagonist for the first time.
