Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never
been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels
like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot
find elsewhere.
My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of
authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue,
from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph
Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own
experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the
language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi
bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the
joys of embracing another language.