Jhumpa Lahiri
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri is a series of vignettes unfolding in the first-person-voice of a university literature professor in her 40s. Lahiri wrote the novel in Italian and translated it into English, herself. The narrator is unnamed, possibly Italian. The location is unnamed, possibly a city in Italy. The 46 chapters of this short novel, covering a period of one year, consist of the narrator’s reflections on her life, her past, and the people she knows. Each reflection is stamped with a location, the whereabouts, as in “At the Street,” “In the Piazza,” “At the Beautician,” etc. But the whereabouts also refers to the narrator’s fluctuating emotional locations at any point in time. No more than a few pages long, the chapters are stand-alone and not in any particular sequence.
The narrator reveals she had an unhappy childhood with an emotionally distant father and a mother prone to fits of rage. She has had relationships, but nothing lasted. She describes feeling out of place at an academic conference, at work-related meetings, and at gatherings with friends. At times, she seems to celebrate her solitude and longs to be back at her apartment; at others, she seems frightened at being so alone. She is curious about strangers she sees in coffee shops or on trains, imagining scenarios about who they are, where they are going, and what they are doing. Her life is replete with deliberate routines and rituals to anchor her days and to give her a sense of purpose.
There is no plot. The episodes are disconnected and fragmentary. The friends, former lovers, colleagues, parents, and strangers are presented as shadowy figures viewed through the prism of detachment. They serve primarily as prompts for the writer’s meditations. These either reinforce her gratitude for solitude or are reminders of her loneliness. Adrift in life, disconnected from others, going through the motions of living, and longing to locate her place in the world, her mediations are poignant and handled with sensitivity and delicacy.
Lahiri’s writing is subtle, restrained, spare, and slow-moving. But the cumulative effect is powerful, resulting in a compelling novel, highly recommended for its portrayal of the internal landscape of a solitary life.