Whereabouts

Exuberance and dread attachment and estrangement in this novel Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home an engaging backdrop to her days acts as a confidant the sidewalks around her house parks bridges piazzas streets stores coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work where she never quite feels at ease she has girl friends guy friends and him a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year as one season gives way to the next transformation awaits. One day at the sea both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat her perspective will change. This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement. Review Jhumpa Lahiri's latest is a sharp unapologetic novel which makes no attempt to please ―The HinduWhereabouts is a chronicle of pain and solitude ―The TribuneWhereabouts perhaps because she has translated it herself is an accomplished effort a novella-length piece of fiction that reads like a contemporary European novel and not much like Lahiri's English-language stories and novels ―India TodayWhereabouts is definitely one of the most-anticipated books of 2021 ―Times of IndiaJhumpa Lahiri's new novel Whereabouts translated by her from Italian is a sublime meditation on place language and identity ―MintStructured as the novel is in the form of brief vignettes Whereabouts is replete with precise sublime writing ―Scroll About the Author Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction Interpreter of Maladies The Namesake Unaccustomed Earth and most recently The Lowland. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize a PEN/Hemingway Award the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.