If language speaks us, as Lacan claimed, and as Aron - the young protagonist of The Book of Intimate Grammar - senses intuitively, then our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms and even the act of investigating and naming the self is both arbitrary and suspect. A lost language would mean a misplaced self; and indeed, Aron has caught a fleeting and provocative glimpse of a shadow father behind the father he knows, a lithe and animated Papa who is telling a joke in the Polish forbidden by Mama, and who is attached like a vibrant ghost to the sad overweight present-day Papa, the one who protests forlornly: 'But there are some things I can only say in Polish.' And if Papa-as-he-used-to-be has been lost in translation, in what voice can Aron's disturbing ideas about himself, and about the family and the society around him, speak themselves? Clearly he will need to concoct a whole new grammar, private and subversive. But then who will understand his secret syntax?

LRB 12 January 1995 | PDF Download