Misinterpretation, the title of Ledia Xhoga’s first novel, works on two levels. Its most literal referent is its unnamed narrator’s profession: translating and interpreting between several languages – Russian, Italian, English, her native Albanian – in New York City. But most of her life’s interpretative difficulties are not strictly linguistic; they result instead from disconnects between her social spheres.
Her American husband, Billy, is a film professor at New York University. Her family back in Tirana is proud of her upward mobility, but out of step with her new ways. (Her mother, taken to a small-plates restaurant by the narrator when she is on a visit back to Albania, brings along food from home.) The narrator’s marriage, meanwhile, strains under the weight of her relationships with more precariously positioned immigrants: Alfred, a Kosovar survivor of torture who confesses his feelings for her after she interprets one of his therapy sessions; Leyla, a Kurdish poet she meets at a literary event; and Rakan, who stalks and photographs Leyla on behalf of her ex-husband. Upset and bewildered by what he sees as her credulous involvement with these “random people”, Billy leaves home for a night, then for weeks. The narrator worries over his absences, but declines to end her other entanglements. Xhoga’s portrait of her ambivalence evokes a cubist painting: full of perspectives that resist resolution into a clear or unitary image.
We are presented with alternative angles on most of the things the narrator does and most of the people she knows. Is Alfred a sympathetic autodidact who connects meaningfully with her over their shared background – or another inappropriate guy who brings only chaos to her life? When Billy disapproves of her work with Alfred, or slams a door into a wall after she invites Leyla to sleep over, is he acting like a selfish, sheltered bigot or a lovingly protective husband? And when the narrator pursues Rakan, tricking him into a date so that she can steal the phone he uses to photograph Leyla, is she helping her poet friend or acting on a strange attraction to the aggressive young man? Many novels achieve this kind of multiplicitous characterization with portions written from different perspectives. Xhoga achieves it, with impressive efficiency, through her narrator’s equal-opportunities empathy. After quoting, say, Billy’s unfair critique of Albanians – that they are all “good-hearted ignorant[s]” – she’ll immediately pivot to something like, “Out of context, Billy’s remark sounded more obnoxious than it had been”.
More than a novel of misinterpretations, this is a novel of shifts in perception. “Only ten hours away from New York, and my American life had already slipped into peripheral awareness”, the narrator reflects during her trip to Albania. “One life would seem like the true one, the other distant, almost imaginary. Then they would switch.” Like many sentences in the book, these describe both their immediate object and something just beyond it. Sometimes the technique is heavy-handed: shortly before Alfred admits, unexpectedly, the depth of his romantic interest, another man describes an encounter with a puddle. “Didn’t know it was that deep”, he says. “It was deceiving.” But the narrator’s reflection on physical displacement doubles elegantly as a description of the way the novel moves. The fluctuation between Alfred and Billy, say, has the same rhythm as the fluctuation between Tirana and New York. One man comes into focus as the other blurs into the background, like alternating frames in one of the films Billy is always watching.
Misinterpretation builds to the question of which man’s face we will see across from the narrator’s at the end. Husband or compatriot? Symbol of the future or symbol of the past – or neither? Where will her floating consciousness land? In the final pages, she walks towards Washington Square Park. She has planned to meet Alfred to discuss translating an essay he has written on surviving the massacres in Kosovo. En route, she gets a text from Billy. It seems she will do one thing, then she does another. Either would have been plausible. Ledia Xhoga has prepared us to consider each decision from every possible vantage point. The satisfaction is in accepting the baton of exquisite ambivalence as she takes it from the narrator’s hands and passes it to the reader.
Megan Marz is a writer living in Chicago
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