BookLife Review: Whereabouts, A Novel, by Jhumpa Lahiri
unnamed narrator, a year in the life of a woman in Italy, dislocation, loneliness, neighborhood as salvation and community, daily rituals and routines
Can you ever have too much of Pulitzer prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri? Arguably not. In one sense Lahiri’s latest, Whereabouts, A Novel, is a bit of a tease for those wanting to linger and wallow in a new Lahiri novel. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies Pulitzer-winner was a series of stories about Indian immigrants, with themes of loss, grief and loneliness. Whereabouts flips that concept a bit on its head. It is a novel of a year in the life of a(n unnamed) single woman living in an unnamed city (which I read to be somewhere in Italy). The narrator combats loneliness by adhering to her regular outings and rituals in her city--a pool where she swims, a train station she frequents when she visits her widowed mother (and where she fantasizes about a man she regularly sees there), a stationery shop, a piazza, a cafe. She is both of the city and dislocated within it.
Description of the character is sparse, and we best become acquainted with the narrator through her daily and weekly habits and routines, and how she responds to them, and to deviations from them. Most remarkable about this novel, however, is its structure—the staccato brevity of the chapters. Lahiri segments the book in to what seem to be snapshots, short snippets or clips of the narrator’s experience, rarely more than 2 or three pages at a stretch. The narrative is not continuous; there is room for wandering and imagination between the chapters. The reader fills in the blanks and is allowed, perhaps encouraged, to imagine and color in the open spaces. Reading this book is like a sojourn to a foreign place that is at once foreign and homey. It is a series of postcards, or tiny canvases of language akin to the street artist sketches and oils scattered about a plaza that give you a baseline impression or sense of place.
Lahiri originally wrote the book in Italian and it was translated into English. One wonders what literary value was added by that approach. Did writing in Italian allow her to describe the piazzas and alleyways more authentically, more poetically? Are the brief and sometimes abrupt or clipped chapters intentionally so, or is that sensation heightened by translation? These questions are an exercise in luxury, the luxury of parsing the genius writer with the power to bring them to the fore.