The protagonist of Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation is determined to help others yet rarely stops to think about what would really help them. Although she is always willing to step up, her efforts to make life a little better for the misfortunate, things always seem to go wrong. We rarely see this side of good deeds: when trying to help just makes things worse.
The unnamed protagonist is a polyglot, equally talented at interpreting for immigrants at their court appearances and translating technical manuals into Italian, Albanian, and other languages. Her work keeps her incredibly busy, yet she is more than willing to step up to do favors–much to her academic American husband’s frustration. He never knows when someone will knock at their door with a request to crash in their study or an entire family looking for a favor. At first, it’s hard to understand Billy’s anger. How can he be mad when his wife is helping people? It takes a few good deeds to understand the toll it to give all your time to others.
The first person we see receive help from our protagonist is Alfred, a torture survivor from Kosovo. The interpreter has only been engaged to translate for Alfred at a dentist appointment but the untrusting Alfred quickly grows attached to our protagonist. Within hours, it seems, he asks for her to not only interpret for him at his therapist appointments but also take classes to re-certify to do this kind of highly stressful and emotional work. Their relationship is fraught with the kind of emotional connection that all the ethical codes warn against. The next person is a Kurdish woman who is being followed on orders from her abusive husband and our protagonist makes even more thoughtless efforts to help his woman find a safe harbor.
As I read, I constantly reflected on the title of this book. A misinterpretation is a mistake we make when we think we know what’s going on. We use the incomplete information we have to make a decision or take an action, only to learn later that if we had slowed down to learn a little more about the situation, serious errors could have been avoided entirely. One might think that personal experience might have taught our protagonist not to keep jumping into people’s lives like a do-gooder paratrooper but, again, how does one stop trying to help people who need it? The protagonist’s misinterpretations offer a lot of food for thought about balancing one’s own needs against the needs of others, about taking care of our loved ones as much as we take care of others, and about pausing to think about what would be truly helpful instead of following one’s misguided instincts.
Misinterpretation is a book that invites reflection; I would definitely recommend it to anyone who takes care of others or has such a caretaker in their life because of the way it leads us to think about altruism, burnout, frustration, and self-worth.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.