The American thriller writer James Patterson has taken time out from dreaming up bloody ends for a series of characters to donate £10,000 to two flooded English bookshops.
Exile
My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.
Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it.
I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.
I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her language.
There are many things to be learned from Studs’s 1960 interview with Simone de Beauvoir in her Paris apartment, but perhaps one of the most charming bits of trivia, is that even a philosopher and feminist icon like Simone de Beauvoir made up silly quizzes with her girlfriends when she was sixteen. Only this silly quiz had a profound result, it was one of the first moments Beauvoir realized writing was her destiny.
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