Setting the Bar

Dreaming in Hindi  by Katherine Russell Rich has seemingly been all over the place. There have been reviews everywhere from the New York Times to the lowly book bloggers, like me and for good reason.

I’ll be dead serious here - I love memoirs about people that have traveled. And usually, I find myself falling in love with and reading travel memoirs or memoirs about people who live in foreign countries for extended periods of time. It’s one of the guilty pleasures that I have about books - hell, if I can’t go to a place, at least I can read about someone else who has! I was really happy to pick this book up, although I could have done a lot less with the science that she put in the memoir.

In this  memoir, Ms. Rich recounts the year that she spent living in Udaipur in India, learning how to speak Hindi. While there, she not only took classes but lived with an Indian host family, who were supposed to speak only Hindi to her, so that she could be immersed in the language. Ms. Rich elected to do this in mid-life, after having lost her job at a magazine. This is scary and I give her a lot of credit for going to a completely different part of the world, where she didn’t know the language and didn’t have any connections whatsoever.

The memoir part of the story is, in itself, well-written. Ms. Rich is a sharp observer of the people around her, from her Indian host family to her countrymen, who are living there and learning the language.  Her sharpness and keen observations make for fantastic writing that engages all of the senses. The reader can see, hear, smell and vividly experience everything that Ms. Rich does. However, interspersed throughout her beautifully written memories about India, Ms. Rich has elected to educate us about the science of acquiring a second language. And I found this to be absolutely boring and dry as hell. I simply wasn’t interested and it ruined the flow of the rest of the memoir.  It was so bad that I often skipped over the hypertechnical science speak so that I could focus on the beauty of her writing on India.

Overall, I thought that this was a generally enjoyable book even though the science bits were often very difficult to navigate.

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