Foreign Words

*Foreign Words* is an *invitation au voyage* [italics], a book that takes us on a journey through time and space with the story teller as he travels from Paris where he lives as the book opens, to Greece where he grew up, and where his father has just died, to the Central African Republic as he undertakes the learning of Sango.

Why learn Sango? is a question the book's narrator himself has trouble answering. His ruminations on the surprising decision to study it are both humorous and penetrating. He traces events from his past (his early infatuation with Tarzan, a picture of his grandfather taken in Bangi before WWI, the death of his mother) and confronts his own mortality, suspecting that, at the age of fifty-two, he might be incapable of learning anything new, or summoning the courage to venture outside what he knows, or having amorous adventures.... He hopes to disprove such suspicions, of course. He also ruminates on his inability to write the phrase "my father is dead" in either of the two languages he knows, his native Greek, his adopted French.

All these themes, along with questions about French colonialism in Africa and the political reasons for his exile in France, are woven into an intimate portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with the death of his father and the fact that, in one of the book's more poignant lines, he is now "all alone one." In the midst of his Sango study (which we observe and take part in, learning Sango as he does), Alexakis's narrator discovers that he is able to write "baba ti mbi a kui," 'my father is dead,' in that language quite easily: it has no associations for him and carries none of his memories. Inevitably perhaps, as he acquires experience through the language, meets its living speakers, travels in the places where it grew up and has struggled to survive, his use of Sango changes. He grows more sensitive to its nuances, its music. And in the end, he finds himself unable, now in yet a third language, to utter the telling phrase.

The work is a profound meditation on language and loss, on the language of loss, and also on the power and magic of words their power to change the way we see ourselves, their magic to renew our lives after hardship, loss, and death. The story is simultaneously filled with delicate suspense and emotional honesty, while the narration is full of humor, tender self-deprecation, and subtle irony.

As one reviewer has put it, the novel is "a new and wondrous meditation on languages, their lives, their death the terrible moment when they have no more voice on words that know everything and are able to give you back your memories, your history." Or as Alexakis's narrator says, "Languages return the interest you show in them. They tell you stories only to encourage you to tell your own.... Foreign words are compassionate. They are moved by the least little sentence you write in their language, and it doesn't matter if it's filled with mistakes."