Jhumpa Lahiri’s second autobiographical journey uses an unlikely vehicle

Jhumpa Lahiri’s long essay, The Clothing of Books, is part personal, part paean to the book cover, now in the danger of vanishing, thanks to the Internet Age. I must confess that I read a digital version; downloading the e-version provided instant access. The cover came up on screen, the words etched against a meditative sombre blue. But the text had a greater prominence, allowing for little distraction on the cover’s part – something Lahiri takes on in this essay, which is partly about the piquant contradictions and complexities that surround a book cover.

What they represent

From the very moment of its inception, the cover of a book signals the moment when the book no longer belongs to the author. This is when a whole host of other people, some who have had no hand in shaping the text within, come into play, and who must now decide how to best represent the book’s contents – to help in “categorization” of the book, slot it into “genre”, to help enhance its marketability.

All too often, especially with the increasing digitisation of our age and the reach of social media, the cover is the first thing that is “shared”; and, as Lahiri writes, the first thing that is “blamed” when a book fails.

Lahiri’s relations with her own book covers are ambivalent, sometimes contradictory. As in the way this essay begins with Lahiri’s own longing to don a uniform when, on a holiday to Calcutta, she sees her cousins putting on their school uniforms. Uniforms grant a sense of belonging, evoke familiarity and make one part of a comforting collective. In America, her mother always wore the clothes of her youth in Bengal, but not Lahiri, who felt “awkward” and out of place in clothes her parents picked for her.

The contradictions

This gave her a sense of hybridity, a dual identity – something Lahiri also notices in her book covers. On a few occasions, she acknowledges, she has been “repelled” by her own book covers and admits using the bound galleys of her book at public readings. The blurbs on a book cover – even on her own – are a distraction, an interruption between the book itself and the reader. As Lahiri says, blurbs have come to matter, for a reader comes to a book like a tourist using a guidebook for a city.

Till the publication of her first work in both Italian and English, which appeared in 2015, Lahiri has had little or no say in her own book covers. Most times, her covers came to her via email, in almost the final stage. It was more or less understood that her suggestions would be considered, but would not be binding – the gesture of asking was a formality. A fact very many authors would readily identify with.

A cover is “the visual representation of the book”, and yet authors are rarely consulted on this matter. The Stephen sisters, Lahiri writes, were a rare exception: When Vanessa Bell illustrated covers for books written by her sister Virginia Woolf, she relied on the latter to summarise the story, to give her the appropriate images that conveyed the book’s meaning. In short, Vanessa had “optical echoes” to rely on.

Lahiri does not dwell on the long history of the book cover; except to say that in the beginning covers made of expensive material such as metal and leather, gave the book some protection; now book covers attract, though they may repel too. Covers, after all, are meant to persuade, even compel, the reader to an instant decision – to buy or simply put the book back on the shelf. This very placing too, with the book tucked away or face up on the shelf, is conflictual. In a library, a book is classified by a number, not by its cover. In a bookshop, a book facing up is a revelation of some special status.

Attachments formed

Book covers as a necessary accessory are around two centuries old, as Wikipedia will tell you. First editions, complete with the original book covers, now command impressive prices at auctions. Lahiri also dwells on the distinct geography of a book cover – every country, or rather, every linguistic region, prefers its distinct cover. A book, sometimes her own, could have different covers for different languages; a metaphor that could stand for globalisation itself. “An inability to recognise oneself in the other”.

Of all her book covers, Lahiri confesses her favourite is the one for In Altre Parole, the Italian edition of her, In Other Words. It has a woman facing a wall but conveys light and ambiguity at the same time. In a sense, then, it’s the cover of this, her fifth book, written in Italian, that Lahiri feels most attached to.

One could draw from this a deeper implication; of Lahiri’s own growing attachment to a language, for she learnt Italian much later in life. A journey she narrates in In Other Words. The Clothing of Books is her second Italian book, and these make up the more autobiographical of her work – her first forays in nonfiction.

The Clothing of Books began life as a lecture, one Lahiri delivered at Florence’s Festival degli Scrittori. It was translated into English by her husband, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. These two languages – English and Italian – are tongues that Lahiri can, with seeming ease, slip in and out of. Just as a book cover can change (as with a dust jacket or even its shape), becoming something else altogether and still staying the same. Book covers, her own, could be telling the story of Lahiri’s own dual identities.