Review: 'Whereabouts,' by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Whereabouts" is the latest novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her debut story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies." This new small work of fiction is remarkable in that the London-born author, who has lived most of her life in America, wrote the novel in Italian and translated it herself into English.

Lahiri moved to Italy in 2012 to better experience what it meant to be an immigrant forced to learn a new language. Already fluent in Bengali and English, she was introduced to Italian in graduate school, so when in Rome she did as the Romans do: She stopped reading and writing in English entirely and devoted all her linguistic skills to Italian.

Written in first-person voice, and having 50 abstractly titled short chapters — almost stand-alone vignettes — "Whereabouts" tells the story (well, kind of a story) of a solitary 46-year-old woman who lives in an unnamed Italian city, and who spends much of her time observing her surroundings.

She is an academic, a teacher of writing. And while she isn't particularly devoted to her occupation — "I'm here to earn a living, my heart's not in it" — by the novel's end she's earned a fellowship in another country, causing her to pack up her apartment, board a train and move on. Just as the reader moves on at the book's conclusion.

This is a very internalized novel, where nothing really occurs. We learn about our unnamed protagonist's past (her father died when she was a teen) and her present (she can't sleep well unless she hears the city traffic), and how then and now intersect. One might believe she is unhappy, seemingly unsatisfied with her life. Yet perhaps not, as she describes solitude as a "certain discipline," a condition she is trying to perfect, one, she tells us, that she may have learned from her mother.

In this beautiful novel, which might not appeal to fans of plot-driven narratives, the reader becomes immersed in the head of its subject. "In My Head," in fact, is the name of three chapters; others give the reader an idea of what our protagonist is up to, or at least where she is: "At the Stationer's," "In Front of the Mirror," "On the Street."

Without artifice, Lahiri's elegant phrases throughout the book reveal as much about her character as they do about the author's understanding of her environment and the people who inhabit it: "Every blow in my life took place in spring. Each lasting sting. That's why I'm afflicted by the green of the trees, the first peaches in the market, the light flowing skirts that the women in my neighborhood start to wear."

In the end, this reviewer's sole regret is that he wishes "Whereabouts" was longer so he could linger a bit more with Lahiri's meditative and lyrical prose.

Jim Carmin is a writer and librarian in Oregon.

Whereabouts
By: Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from Italian by the author.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 166 pages, $24.