Jhumpa Lahiri
In a series of short vignettes, some only 2 pages long, the first-person narrator in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Whereabouts, unwraps her life as she meanders through various locations in an unnamed Italian city where she lives.
The unnamed narrator is a forty something university professor, living alone. She derives comfort by establishing a routine and rituals for herself, frequenting the same restaurant, coffee shop, bookstore, streets, and piazzas. She has friends and work colleagues, but she never seems to fit in, viewing herself as an outsider. She shies away from intimacy and is estranged even from her mother, her sole surviving relative.
The vignettes cover a period of one year. The city is shown in its seasonal ebb and flow with the narrator enjoying the first burst of spring or shivering under a winter blast. She describes what she sees, hears, and thinks wherever she happens to be, whether she is in bed, in the coffee shop, in the pool, on a train, or under a shade tree. She is an astute observer of people, their comings and goings and their overheard conversations. But she is primarily concerned with analyzing herself. She records her moods and is preoccupied with trying to understand the triggers that generate her feelings of contentment, sadness, depression, alienation, or belonging. At the end of the novel, her decision to leap into unknown territory by accepting a fellowship at an unfamiliar place perhaps indicates her willingness to push back her self-imposed boundaries.
The novel is without a plot. Lahiri originally wrote it in Italian and then translated it herself into English. This once removed process may account for the narrator’s unwillingness or inability to allow for intimacy. Not only does she distance herself from others, but she distances herself from the reader. The impression is of a person talking to herself, not of one inviting others into her life. Her language is restrained; her observations are detached and calculated. Her impenetrable external veneer inhibits investment in her as a person or in her story. As a result, we don’t really get to know her or feel sympathy for her isolationism. What we do get is a glimpse into the self-absorbed mind of an individual who has taken deliberate steps to maintain her sequestered lifestyle while simultaneously trying to locate her place in the world.