The brouhaha over immigration – with all of the shouting about Dreamers, deportations, walls, and bad words for troubled places – strikes Jhumpa Lahiri especially hard.

The British-born, American-based Pulitzer Prize-winning author and daughter of Bengali immigrants, best-known for her lauded 2003 novel The Namesake, which became a well-regarded 2006 film, constantly explores the alienation and dislocation that come from being society's ethnic other.

It's a theme that runs like a jagged California fault line through her most recent nonfiction work, In Other Words (2016), her chronicle of living in Italy and learning Italian that was published in a single volume containing English and Italian versions.

In Other Words, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf Doubleday)

But In Other Words was no Eat Pray Love lark. She not only moved to Italy for three years, she gave up speaking or writing in English completely, totally immersing herself in a new culture that she never felt truly at home in. No matter how proficient her linguistic skills – she became fluent – Lahiri never felt completely accepted by Italians. Often, they would insist on speaking to her in English, largely, she presumed, because of her South Asian appearance.

"I know that if I stayed in Italy for the rest of my life," writes Lahiri, "even if I were able to speak a polished, impeccable Italian, that wall, for me, would remain."

So the current anti-immigrant climate, in both the U.S. and Europe, is one she finds personal and disturbing. Lahiri, who appears Tuesday, Jan. 30 at Temple Emanu-El as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live series, was part of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. She and all of her fellow committee members resigned in August after President Donald Trump's "all sides" speech in the wake of the Charlottesville violence that claimed the life of an anti-Nazi protester in Charlottesville, Va.

"I fear this reflects a more general condition in the United States," she says. "I mean, Europe has this problem as well, in terms of its distrust, mistrust, fear, phobia of foreigners and of otherness," Lahiri, 50, said in an interview by phone from Princeton, N.J. "Europe and the United States are very different places with different history, reality and politics. But I do think there are certain strains in common ... just [from] living in both places, [there's] a similar sense of closure. That's very worrisome to me.

Jhumpa Lahiri speaks Jan. 30 as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live. ( Arts & Letters Live / Liana Miuccio)

"It's very hard for me to even comment on anything that is happening right now in our government ... . It's totally surreal," she continued. "The fact that Donald Trump was even elected, even the fact that that could happen, I don't think I really even fully processed that ... . But then again, now, Italy is holding elections in two months, and it is possible that [Silvio] Berlusconi will once again become prime minister. What can I say? The world is in a really, very strange moment right now.

"It's odd because I think the three places that I have connections to, the three parts of the world that I feel like my spirit resides – in India, in Italy and in the United States – the governments of all three of those places right now are just so problematic on so many levels," she said. "In terms of just the level of intolerance and the discourse of hatred and of this idea of closure and just going against the grain of everything that I believe in and that I am, and all of the progress that one likes to think has been made historically."

The Italian way

If Lahiri's earlier feelings of cultural disconnection were involuntary – her parents brought her to the U.S. when she was 2 years old – the author went to Italy of her own accord after becoming enamored of the country during a 1994 post-collegiate trip to Florence.

Nearly two decades later, Lahiri – a wife and a mother of two by then – summoned the courage to remove her English-language safety net by relocating to and diving deep into the culture she had fallen in love with. It came after she had proved herself a master of English, nabbing the Pulitzer for her 1999 short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, as well as general acclaim for another set of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008).

Though she still maintains a residence in Italy, she's back on American soil these days, teaching creative writing at Princeton while readjusting and re-evaluating her relationships to both languages. "I have much more of a day-to-day life in English again. I teach and so forth," she said. "I have become a translator from Italian, so I've started working again in that sense, creatively in English, though not with my own work, translating somebody else's work.

"I would add that the anxiety I had at that point about my connection to Italian being so precarious and the worry that it would abandon me if I left, that has subsided to a great degree ... I feel like I now have two very active linguistic lives side by side. Every day I'm speaking Italian and English, and I'm writing in Italian and English."

But, she admits, there's still an underlying unease.

"I don't think I feel ever fully at home in any language," she said. "That's kind of what the book was about, describing that condition of feeling always somehow outside of a language for different reasons, whether it's English or Italian or Bengali, my first language, just always having a relationship that is somehow puzzling or problematic or challenging, and never being able to identify fully with anything, with any one form of linguistic identity."

The next novel

In this Oct. 13, 2013 file photo, author Jhumpa Lahiri poses with her book The Lowland in London. (AP/Sang Tan / (DMN file))

English-speaking fans of Lahiri's work have been wondering when they're going to get more fiction from her. After all, her second novel, The Lowland, was published five years ago. But the wait might not be too much longer.

"I just finished a novel that I wrote in Italian, and that's going to be published this year in Italy," she said. "I now have to decide whether or not I'm going to translate the novel myself or whether I will again turn to somebody else to do this for me.

"I did just translate a short story myself that I wrote in Italian and that's coming out in The New Yorker. That's sort of a first step ... of this journey in that I'm working in Italian and now I'm moving back into English as a translator of myself. This is yet another iteration of what I'm experimenting with here. So we'll see.

"It was an interesting challenge, needless to say, to translate this short story, which was very short. I mean, we're talking 10 or 12 pages. So I have to think about whether I want to experience that feeling for a longer project. It's not a very long novel, but it's longer than 12 pages," she said. "I have to think about this slowly."

Lahiri says that this novel will deal with the outsider themes that have always animated her work, but readers should get ready for some surprises as well. "It's both a total departure and a distillation of what I've been writing about from the beginning," she reflected. "It's tonally very different. It has a different flavor, a different palate and sensibility.

"The way that I'm looking at the question is different," she continued, "but I think that deep down, I'm looking at the same question of what it means to be in a place or not in a place, this idea of dislocation, both emotional and geographical which has been my theme, my central theme from the beginning of my life as a writer."

Cary Darling is senior features writer at the Houston Chronicle.

Plan your life

Jhumpa Lahiri will discuss her works with Ben Fountain at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 30 at the Olan Sanctuary of Temple Emanu-El, 8500 Hillcrest Ave., as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live. Pre-signed books will be available for sale. Tickets $40; discounts available at dma.org/all.