“There’s a villa near my house that once belonged to a wealthy family, with grounds that attract children and dogs. I like to go in the late morning to walk along the shaded paths. I pass a giant birdcage, as large as a two-story house, with a lovely cupola at the top. It no longer contains birds. Pigeons, filthy and fierce, arrange themselves on the cupola like barbs on a wire. Parrots with their bright-green feathers flit from tree to tree, landing briefly on the grass. The fountain inside the birdcage is covered with moss that’s the same green as the parrot feathers. The water from the fountain never ceases to flow.”
from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent novel Whereabouts, we are drawn into a fragmented narrative—but don’t think of “fragmented” in the cold and removed sense of the word. The incredibly short one-to-six page chapters compose a story that is akin to reading diary entries. So instead of “cold and removed,” think of the intimacy that comes with leafing through the pages of a journal and reading the author’s thoughts, feelings, and observations.
With each entry, we follow our unnamed narrator as she eavesdrops on a couple’s argument on the sidewalk, as she attends a dinner party and becomes increasingly irritated by another guest, and as she recalls her visits to a local stationery shop and the family that once owned it. These everyday and seemingly mundane moments are often the catalysts for, and the backdrops to, memories and recollections that are interwoven in the narrative. While there is a maintained distance between the narrator and the reader as characters are left unnamed and settings remain unidentified, as you move through the work, there is a sense of warmth and intimacy. Slowly, we are given pieces of the narrator’s childhood, her relationship to her parents growing up, and the romantic relationships that began with a spark and fizzled into the unknown and often awkward territory of “friendship post-romance.” Beyond the characters that populate Whereabouts, we follow our narrator as she navigates her surroundings—down the sidewalk, along the path that winds around a villa, and on a train ride home. While Lahiri has left much unknown, undefined, and unspecified, there is something precise about the narrator’s relationship to her surroundings, and I can’t help but think that we’ve been given a taste of life in Italy that is at the same time representative of life everywhere.
I wouldn’t call this novel “experimental” though I’ve heard it is very different from anything Lahiri’s written. While it is recognizable as a novel, there were many times I had to stop and remind myself that I wasn’t reading a memoir or a writer’s diary, and in this way, it does experiment with the boundaries of the novel—it so brilliantly shows us a story instead of simply telling one. It’s difficult to write a summary of this book since there isn’t an obvious storyline, but read it for the vignettes Lahiri has crafted around one woman’s life in Italy, and read it for the writing that is spare but delicately composed. First written in Italian, Lahiri translated the novel herself and the attention to, and admiration for, words and language is palpable on every page. While Whereabouts was first published in 2018, it somehow perfectly captures and encapsulates the fragmented days many of us have experienced over the last year or so—the jolt between movement and stagnation, and the singularity that often comes with living in a city—though it does so with empathy and insight, and you might just recognize yourself in a few scenes.
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Dove mi trovo is the Italian title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, which roughly translates to ‘where I am’ and ‘where I find myself’. After reading Whereabouts, I decided that I was going to learn Italian—I’ll be opening my beginner’s guide on Monday in hopes of one day rereading this novel in Italian, though I’m sure I will return to this book many more times over the coming years!
Sydney K Erickson 
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