Why I have become a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri's writing
by Annavajhula J.C. Bose*
Whereabouts is Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, nearly ten years after her last book was published. It was originally written in Italian and translated into English by the author herself, a remarkable achievement.
The narrator of the story is a middle-aged, unnamed, unmarried Roman woman in an unnamed city. She describes her experience of wading through modernity as “disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around.”
Movement and departure are central to the narrator’s life: “I’ve always been moving, that’s all I’ve ever been doing. Always waiting either to get somewhere or to come back. Or to escape…Is there any place we’re not moving through?”
The narrator roams the streets and sidewalks as well as wanders within herself, into the deepest recesses of her inner self. She is in constant conversation with herself about her relationships, the geographical and emotional places she inhabits, the vacuous connections she forms with people and the remaining vestiges of family bonds.
As the story unfolds, Lahiri’s writing exposes us to numerous dualities we face in life: knowing and not-knowing, light and shadow, stillness and movement, exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement, contentment and dissatisfaction.
The duality also extends to the narrator’s actions. She is peevish, judgmental and given to self-flagellation, even as she enjoys having affairs and is a “terrible” daughter. She also sees herself as a “survivor,” a solicitous friend and a tired teacher.
It is as if the narrator is talking to her “double”: “I’m me and also someone else, that I am leaving and also staying.”
The narrator comes to terms with the pain of loneliness by beating it with the pleasure of solitude. Solitude should not be mistaken for loneliness. It is a positive state of engagement with oneself. It is being alone or remote from society without being lonely.
Whereabouts is a meditative peephole into the narrator’s mind, sequestered and alienated from places, people and events. It is hence a vivid portrayal of loneliness and solitude, coincidentally at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated such social issues.
Nilanjana Sudeshna (Jhumpa) Lahiri debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Falling in love with the Italian language and the immersive experience of reading and writing in Italian only, she wrote her nonfiction autobiographical work, In Other Words (2017), in Italian; it has been translated into English.
Lahiri, 54 years old, was born in London and raised in Rhode Island, U.S. Her Bengali parents, a teacher and a librarian, took their family on regular trips to Kolkata, India, to visit extended family. Lahiri earned a B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College, New York; an M.A. in Comparitive Literature, M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, all from Boston University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Alberto Vourvoulias, and two children.
This is the first time I have read Lahiri’s writing. As several critics have noted, Whereabouts – and her earlier works – depict deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes and a poetics of cross-cultural dislocation. She tells the story in fragments and in pared-down prose and short sentences, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s writing.
Whereabouts deserves its popularity. It is a New York Times bestseller and on Goodreads, a book readers’ site owned by Amazon, it has gotten about 11,400 votes.