Davide Lodge “Changing Places”

One of my passions – books about books. It can be something like The Thirteenth Tale where the whole novel is built on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, or it can be something more like Reading Lolita in Tehran where reading books is an important part of the novel. Changing Places is not just about books, it’s about literature professors. Vain, arrogant and dried up academic from one of the best of the US universities goes to Britain for six months to teach in some crappy place in the middle of nowhere. His place is taken for these six months by nerdy loser from that crappy place who didn’t even get his PhD, and never wrote a single article. Sounds like fun?

Surprisingly, it is fun. Though the main characters are absolutely disgusting, it’s interesting to see how the narrator plays with them.

There is also a comparison between American and British educational systems (and neither looks really attractive in this representation). Looks like professors do not really care about the students, though students do not look nice either. They care only about having fun and getting good grades for nothing, and even their protests and sit-downs (the action takes place in 60s, so the students in the book do protest a lot) are kind of hypocritical, and looks like all they care about is to get stoned or drunk and to fuck. The courses that are taught are strange too, one of them, for example, is called “How to Write a Novel”. Not even creative writing, but novel. Of course, the course is taught by people who have no idea about writing, and all students think of themselves as future bestseller writers.

What I didn’t like the most is the open end. I’m Jane Austen girl; I need stability and restoration of the order at the end. And I did expect marriage here in this book. No marriage, not even some certainty about something. I feel like kid who was promised to get an ice-cream after taking out his tonsils…

My Multilingual Life

I was born and raised in Russia, in a monolingual environment. Yes, I studied foreign languages at school, of course, but, frankly, it was a waste of time. I studied French from the 1^st grade till the 9^th. I don’t remember anything. Well, perhaps, some basic words, but that’s it. I took Latin, Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic for a year in the 9^th grade. I don’t remember anything either. I started to learn English in the 10^th grade, and, though, I studied it for 4 years (two years of the university included), my knowledge was very poor. The thing is that I’m actually good at learning languages. How come at 21 I ended up not knowing a single foreign language? Well, I blame the educational system – considering that foreign language is mandatory in Russia on all levels of education you’d be surprised to see how many people are monolingual.

I always wanted to study abroad, but without English it would be impossible. So I decided to learn it. It was the summer after my graduation from the Ural State University (Philosophy major), all the courses in language schools started in fall, but I wanted immediate action. I got the first Harry Potter book in English (I’m a big fan of Harry Potter books, I read them countless times), which I’d read already in Russian (several times, yeah) and started to read. Well, read wouldn’t be an accurate word. Though I had some knowledge of vocabulary and a very vague idea of English grammar, still I had to look up almost every word in a dictionary. At the time I didn’t have an electronic dictionary, so I used a bulky volume of the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary. It took me one hour to get through the first page. Half a year after I was able to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in a few days without using any dictionary. But don’t assume that in half a year I understood English fluently. It was a long journey that still lasts and I learn every day.

Since then many things happened. From my monolingual environment I moved to Israel about two years ago. I study English literature at the Haifa University, and my basic day is divided between three languages – English (the language of my studies, reading for pleasure and watching TV-series), Russian (the language of my family and friends) and Hebrew (the language of the country, of my job and of many other kinds of interactions). Sometimes I have to speak all three languages in 10 minutes. When talking to my fiancée I am usually code-switching a lot, speaking a messy mix of Russian, Hebrew and English. I started to learn Spanish. I’m thinking of taking up Korean and Polish, and of reviving my French. I started to make mistakes in Russian (and I was proud of my almost flawless Russian before).

This blog is about my multilingual life, learning languages, funny episodes, challenges, losses and victories. Occasionally I’ll also write about the books I read and the shows I watch.