Whereabouts

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.

Whereabouts

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.