Success Quote by Harry Mathews

There is a special kind of self-deception that comes with linguistic skill: the belief that grammar can buy you a new identity. Mathews frames it as a "mistaken dream", then corrects himself to "fantasy", a quiet escalation that matters. A dream is passive; a fantasy is chosen. The line admits not just error but complicity: he wanted to believe fluency could function like a costume, something you slip into and are suddenly read differently by the world, and maybe by yourself.

The parenthetical "perhaps because I'm good at languages" is doing double work. It’s an ego-check and an origin story. Talent becomes temptation. If you can move smoothly between tongues, it’s easy to assume you can move smoothly between selves - that accent and idiom are levers that rearrange social status, history, even personality. Mathews punctures that hope with the phrase "become someone else", which lands as both liberating and a little suspect. Who is dissatisfied enough with the original "someone" to shop for replacements abroad?

In the cultural context of mid-to-late 20th-century expatriate mythologies, Italy and France are not neutral settings. They’re shorthand for reinvention narratives: the artist abroad, the American escaping provincialism, the romance of being misrecognized on purpose. Mathews, a writer attuned to artifice, exposes the catch: language can open doors, but it can’t erase the body carrying the passport. Fluency grants access, not absolution. The fantasy is less about communication than about control - the longing to author your own reception.