After 20-plus years of writing a series of successful short story collections, including her 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut Interpreter of Maladies, author Jhumpa Lahiri marks her return to the literary landscape with her first English novel in nearly a decade.

It was only in 2011 — when she, along with her husband and children, moved to Rome — that Lahiri was able to rekindle her relationship with the Italian lingua franca, which she had picked up during her postgraduate years, only to eventually find herself writing a novel in it. Five years later, in 2018,

once she felt she had come comfortably far in her linguistic journey, Lahiri went ahead and wrote Dove Mi Trovo, her first novella in Italian. Subsequently, she undertook the enormous task of translating her own work into English, with Whereabouts as her title of choice.

Lahiri’s trade this time around is simple: aloof, dour, kind of plot-less. In the 46 chapters spread over a brief 150 pages or so, we become privy to a year in the inner life of an unnamed narrator who is aching to leave her place of birth in the hope of a brighter, more promising future elsewhere. Each concise chapter is wrought in a prepositional context: ‘On the Train’, ‘On the Sidewalk’ — thereby honing in on our narrator’s exhausting peregrinations about town which not only form the corpus of this title, but signify a banal routine as a pretext to her dwindling lust for life and a yearning to start afresh.

We accompany the narrator to the café where she takes her lunch alone, to various shop fronts, to the salon where she gets her nails done, all the way to her aesthetically drab and mundane office. Through this we learn that she is an academic, a professor of literature at a reputable Italian university, quite similar to the author’s current role as director of the creative writing department at Princeton University (she manages this by travelling back and forth between Italy and the United States).

Written in short vignettes, with each entry averaging a couple of pages or so, Whereabouts explores the raw, unfiltered musings of a solitary woman protagonist living in an unnamed Italian city. In fact, for all its geographical mystery, the author, in no avowed sense, ever reveals which European town the narrative is set in. The Italian-ness only becomes noticeable with the help of a few obvious words such as “trattoria” or “piazza”, or more significantly towards the end when we encounter a group of young tourists on a train practising how to say “arrivederci.”

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest offering, an English translation of her Italian novelette, explores the raw, unfiltered musings of a solitary woman protagonist living in an unnamed Italian city

Each vignette is its own mise-en-scène, that opens in a different setting, with a fresh set of characters and a new narrative arc altogether. The interconnections between the vignettes, therefore, remain tenuous, so one need not rely on past chapters to understand a new one. More aptly, they are similar to how our protagonist describes her psychotherapy sessions: “As if each session were the first and only time we met. Every session was like the start of a novel abandoned after the first chapter.”

The narrator is by no means a flaneur, or a zealous youth on the brink of some genius discovery. Instead, in active, reflective prose, we become immersed in the life a 40-something, middle-aged woman, who feels she has reached an impasse and is desperate to navigate a way out before it is too late.

At the surface level, things seem to be pretty idyllic for this modern woman of the 21st century. She has managed to single-handedly build a comfortable life for herself as a distinguished academic; has an airy, spacious place of abode which she has all to herself; and a respectable group of people with whom she socialises. Yet, somehow, beneath this veneer, inhabits a greater despondency that she is afraid to confront.

“Solitude: It’s become my trade ... it plagues [me],” she admits. An assertion as austere as this steers the novella in a particularly sombre trajectory with things only getting more rancorous from this point forward. We deep dive into the narrator’s past and learn of her strained relationship with her parents. To be raised by a moody and intractable mother and a frugal father who died way before his time, has left our protagonist in an irreversibly vulnerable place wherein she finds it challenging to take the leap and “form lasting ties” with just about anyone, especially those that putatively “matter the most.”

Although our narrator’s meanderings offer us a gyrating view of her life, her detachment is most palpable in her attention to detail in her encounters with the nameless strangers she meets on her excursions around town, rather than her friends and family. We meet the father and daughter who serve her at the trattoria, the beauticians at the nail salon, the married men for whom she develops a quixotically harmful obsession, among others who, as she puts it, “become shadows” that reflect her inner world, a place replete with fleeting cogitations and a desperation to move forward.

Witnessing Lahiri’s characters making singular appearances and not allowed any space to develop can be profoundly aggravating for readers who anticipate an invigorating plot development. Perhaps this is where the narrative may run a bit thin and, in addition to being a repetitive piece of writing, may be denounced by some as terrifyingly dull.

Plot, however, was not the purpose of this novella, according to the author. “I’m more interested in time and space,” Lahiri told journalist Razia Iqbal in an interview discussing Whereabouts for the Lahore Literary Festival. Unlike all her past works which employed people and positionality to construct a narrative about the experience of Indian immigrants in the United States, Whereabouts, by contrast, attempts to view “place in a more abstract way” and uses the accoutrements of time and space as tools, to shed drama on the narrator’s shaky mental constitution and give us a snapshot of a life vacillating between “stasis and movement.”

Stylistically, the short vignettes of Whereabouts read more as a series of journal entries, enumerated over a period of a year evidenced by seasonal changes — “In Spring, I suffer” — than a methodical, chronological concatenation of events documenting the protagonist’s life.

Lahiri, being one of the greatest modern-day stylists of minimal realism, dexterously encapsulates in her spare prose the existential angst of her solitary protagonist, which emanates from being a “new-fashioned” woman; thriving in an independent capacity, unencumbered by a husband and children. Yet the other side of the coin tells a separate story of angst: loneliness.

The denouement, however, glimmers with optimism, when the narrator announces a fellowship that would relocate her somewhere on the “other side of the border” — finally, to live a life she always anticipated. Grief, incertitude, hope. Lahiri captures it all, confirming her as a writer of extraordinary range and much in command of human sympathy.

The reviewer is the digital director of the Lahore Literary Festival. She tweets @itsemanomar

Whereabouts
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Knopf, US
ISBN: 978-0593318317
176pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 25th, 2021