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Whereabouts

A Novel

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Whereabouts

Written by: Jhumpa Lahiri
Narrated by: Susan Vinciotti Bonito
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About this listen

 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies—her first in nearly a decade—about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties.

Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.

We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.

This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement. Foreign Language Audiobooks Genre Fiction Italian Literary Fiction Women's Fiction World Literature
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Whereabouts offers a hushed portrayal of urban loneliness marked by a hint of yearning. Lahiri who purposely fills her quiet life with routines and rituals, writes, "Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect." A repeated theme is how weighty time can be when alone. She feels her loneliness harder during what was intended to be a healing break at a friend's vacant country house. She notes, "Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I've always understood this. It's like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what's left over before going to bed." It was an enjoyable experience.

Worth it

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WHEREABOUTS

From The Lowland to The Interpretor Of Maladies, and now to Whereabouts, I have had a taste of Jhumpa Lahiri's writing. In all these three books, the mood of melancholy cannot be missed.

In this short book, Whereabouts, with the help of mini perspectives of a woman living alone in Italy, she subtly brings about the woman's voice of loneliness, her reasons of not having married or having a boyfriend, her stringent avoidance of gatherings, and the influences of her upbringing which casts a spell on her decisions in her 40s.

Out of the many mini perspectives, I loved the one at her father's grave where she summarises her relationship with him; and how even in his absence he occupies a part of her life, her mind much more than the little dark casket where he lies buried. How his detached demeanor still gives her a heartache.

I also found the one where she describes a group of friendly people in her train compartment, and observing them wishes though subconsciously to have a company like them.

Jhumpa Lahiri has that art of writing as if you are not reading but talking to yourself. It's a soulful Rendezvous. I enjoyed my solitary time with her Whereabouts, translated from her original Italian by herself. But a warning for those who cannot tolerate melancholic monologues of a lonely woman in her 40s: it's better that they give it a miss.

© Maitreyee Joshi

Soulful Rendezvous

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disconnected snippets from a lonely life draws up a cohesive picture. Reading was well paced and clear.

superb reading

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Struggled to finish. Sadness and melancholy galore! Would not recommend. Not a pleasant read.

A melancholic read

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have been an avid followers of Ms Laurie books but this one was disappointing
thw story meanders and comes across as just musings of a bored women watching the world go by.

disappointed

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