Katherine Russell Rich (1955–2012)

[Dreaming in Hindi] by [[Katherine Russell Rich]]

This book could be described as Japanland meets Dreaming in Chinese, two books I read earlier this year, and it is a category of book that I really enjoy -- a loose memoir of immersion in (rather than traveling through) a foreign culture, with its awkward and often misinterpreted personal interactions and language struggles. The author, at age 45, after surviving breast cancer (about which she wrote a previous book that I now want to read) and show more losing her job as a magazine editor, decided to learn Hindi. She began with instructors in the US, then applied to a school in India that required a prior two years of study, a qualification that she didn't remotely possess. She was accepted. (She learned later that the school was desperate for students.) This book is about her year in Udaipur, Rajastan, the teachers and other students at the school, the host family ("Though I continued to draw some lines, as on the evening I came home to find the Jains debating how much money I had in the bank. 'No, you misunderstand.' Dad 2 said when I refused to answer. 'We don't want to take your money. We just really, really, really want to know.' he said, as all ten family members nodded emphatically, in unison."), an assortment of other people in the city who became friends, and the language. The language is what ties the book together, though it is not itself presented (Hindi portions of dialogue are translated into English and italicized). The approximately chronological tale is interspersed with linguistic tidbits, as second language acquisition has become quite the topic of study (there's a bibliography). I'd guess the level to be closer to popular magazine than scholarly journal, but that's about where I'm at and not my primary reason for reading the book anyway, so that's OK. A unexpected twist: The author, whose home was New York, arrived in India the first week of September 2001. In October, she was invited to a performance at a school for deaf children. After her impromptu and embarrassingly incongruous talk about her childhood experience with troublesome adenoids ("These are kids who've had to leave their families. I said 'What?' on the playground."), the kids surrounded her with questions, sign language and mime: "Are you OK?" and flying hand airplanes crashing into vertical hand walls. Emotionally stirred ("Because this is the first time in all this time anyone's asked."), she volunteered to help at the school, and although help wasn't necessarily needed, supplies were, so the teacher ("greedy" for his students) found a place for her. Thus sign language, or rather sign languages (not only mutually unintelligible formal languages, but also the pidgins that the kids arrive with, and the version they have created for communication among themselves), enters into the mix, along with Hindi, official language of India but not what everyone speaks, conversations that switch between Hindi and English in an effort to find a balance of mutual miscommunication, the politics of this word from Sanskrit versus that word from Persian. Regarding politics, be prepared for harrowing violence, though mostly described from a distance rather than witnessed directly. A little more clarity in the timeline would've been nice, and there's a mundane incident in the acknowledgements of a type that I wish had been more prominent elsewhere, but these are minor quibbles about an absorbing book.

(read 23 Jul 2011) show less

When I read the back in the library I thought that the author was a bit of a dingbat, but that the book would probably be interesting. I was right on both counts. I end up impressed. She did manage to spend the whole year in Udaipur. She did learn Hindi. And she also did a lot of research on language learning (and sign language learning) an used it to inform her own learning.

This is not so much a story of a year in India, as an illustrated essay on language learning and cultural show more assimilation. The background of the book also includes both 9/11 and the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. Interesting. show less

This is the third time I've tried to read this. I'm embarrassed to admit that I stopped the first couple of times in part out of jealousy. I am also studying Hindi but I wasn't making such good progress. To be fair it had a lot to do with how little I was studying. This time, though, I have been paying better attention and feeling better about my own skills and so what I found was that reading the book didn't make me feel simultaneously jealous and down on myself for not trying very hard. show more Instead I really enjoyed it. It felt very familiar and reminded me of my own trips to Rajasthan and all of the help I've been getting from native Hindi speakers. Hearing about her own struggles and triumphs as someone learning language later in life felt very familiar. I know exactly what she was feeling when she would describe problems she had or things she was proud of. Her talk about language learning and motivation was also really fascinating. I liked how we went back and forth between her experiences and some of the more technical details.

Like any good travel memoir it makes me feel like I do at the end of a trip to a beloved place - sad to see it come to an end. show less

Adult nonfiction/memoir. This book got decent reviews and sounds promising, but when I tried to read it the author's poor writing style/grammar/punctuation got in the way. The prose doesn't flow at all, and having to stop and re-read sentences or paragraphs on every page was ridiculous. I have trouble believing she is in fact a real writer, it's that bad.