An unnamed woman in an unnamed city wavers between solitude and brief encounters in a spare examination of alienation
When Jhumpa Lahiri published her previous novel, 2013’s The Lowland, a wide-angled family saga centred on the Naxalite uprising in 60s Bengal, she was known chiefly as a writer of cross-cultural dislocation. With The Namesake (2003), a novel about a Bengali-American child who rejects his origins, and two story collections, including her Pulitzer-winning debut, 1999’s Interpreter of Maladies, she anticipated a US vogue for fiction that viewed American culture through the eyes of another. Yet Lahiri, born in London and raised in Rhode Island by parents from Kolkata, was sceptical of that brand: asked in an interview about “immigrant novels”, she observed that, in literature, “the tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme”.
Partly to escape these constraints, she taught herself Italian in her 40s, moving her family to Rome in pursuit of total immersion, an experience recounted in her 2016 memoir, In Other Words, written in Italian and rendered in parallel-text English by Elena Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstein. The following year, she published a translation of Domenico Starnone’s novel Ties; in 2018 came her own Italian novel, Dove mi trovo (Where I Am, or Where I Find Myself), which Lahiri has now translated herself under the less ambiguous title, Whereabouts.
Told by an unnamed teacher in an unnamed city in northern Italy, it’s made up of 46 vignettes, rarely more than two or three pages long, many not obviously about very much. The narrator swims and gets her nails done; there’s a lot of eavesdropping and people-watching. She shares a glance with another delegate in a hotel lift en route to a conference. She goes to the beach, where “there’s always some savage element... an element we crave and cower from at the same time”.
The novel’s hypnotically surgical gleam can verge on bleached sterility
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