San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Jhumpa Lahiri steps out of her comfort zone
For most of her career, Jhumpa Lahiri filled her fiction with Indians living in America. Her characters moved halfway around the world, built families from arranged marriages, braved New England winters, kept old traditions alive and created new ones.
In two story collections, the Pulitzer Prizewinning “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999) and “Unaccustomed Earth” (2008), and two novels, “The Namesake” (2003) and “The Lowland” (2013), she described, with precision and empathy, how it feels to be suspended between two cultures rather than rooted in one — even for the generations born in the United States.
Yet over the past decade, Lahiri, who was born to Bengali parents and raised in the United States, has introduced a third country into her oeuvre. Her sixth book, “Whereabouts,” is now being released in English, but Lahiri wrote it in Italian. The novel was first published in 2018 under the title “Dove Mi Trovo,” which translates, most literally, to “Where I Am.”
“Whereabouts” is spare, distilled, stripped of the textural details of her earlier work but still concerned with identity and belonging, her constant themes. The novel is narrated by an unnamed middle-aged woman, living alone in an unnamed Italian city that could easily be Rome.
She has lived in or near this place her entire life. She is a writer, a teacher. She has a few friends, an ex-lover, an almost lover. She visits her mother. She walks a dog. She overhears conversations.
But within her “urban cocoon” (her phrase), she feels isolated. “Solitude: it’s become my trade,” she thinks. “As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.”
Lahiri builds the story in discrete pieces, like a mosaic. In brief chapters with locating titles — “In the Bookstore,” “In the Sun,” “At His Place,” etc. — short scenes unfold. Although they ultimately assemble themselves into a plot, construction is slow. Eventually, we learn that the narrator is an only child whose unhappy upbringing has contributed to her current discontent. She is ready to make a change in her life, to take a step that might seem small to some but looms large in her limited sphere.
She is unsettled, but articulating that feeling helps propel her forward. She is at home in language.
“Is there any place we’re not moving through?” she wonders. “Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around.
I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.”
Even grounded by Lahiri’s gorgeous sentences, the experience of reading “Whereabouts” falls short. Despite the first-person narration, a chilly distance persists between the narrator and the reader, perhaps because the latter is so present to the book’s strict bit-by-bit construction. The individual chapters never quite converge into a satisfying whole. Readers who recall the warmth radiating from Gogol Ganguli as he comes of age in “The Namesake,” or the ache of the fractured multigenerational family in “The Lowland,” may find this book wanting.
Lahiri has published in Italian before. “In Other Words” (2016), her last book, was a sort of linguistic biography recounting her decadeslong effort to learn Italian. In it, she explains that Italian is the only language she has ever chosen — unlike Bengali, which she grew up speaking at home, and English, the language in which she learned to write. When Lahiri moved to Rome with her family several years ago, she took the opportunity to immerse herself in Italian. She kept a diary of her progress, and that diary became “In Other Words,” a hybrid book printed in both Italian (on the lefthand pages) and English (on the right). Lahiri wrote the Italian section, and translator Ann Goldstein provided the English text.
“Whereabouts” is, perhaps, the next logical step in her journey, a novel written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri herself, a task that must have been daunting. What an accomplishment, particularly for an author who has found so much success and acclaim writing in
English. But what is the reader to make of all this? Do we need the backstory to fully appreciate the new book? Is the new novel’s pared-down style and tonal disconnect a choice, or a manifestation of the limits of writing in a new language? And for those of us who cannot read Italian, what have we lost in this English translation?
To place “Whereabouts” in the context of Lahiri’s larger body of work, we might consider what it is not. It is not the story of someone who has spent a lifetime navigating two cultures. It is not the story of a person whose name and appearance compel strangers to ask about her origins, a constant for so many of Lahiri’s protagonists. Perhaps writing in Italian allowed Lahiri to remove the old furniture in her writing and start fresh in an empty room, exploring familiar themes from a new threshold.
Some readers may not warm to the story, though, even if they appreciate the incredible skill and effort involved in creating it. There’s a cool wind blowing through these pages, and nowhere to get lost or linger.
For Lahiri, writing in Italian means embracing her own limitations, casting off the known in favor of the unknown. “Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection?” she asks, in “In Other Words.” “What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”
A brave and inquisitive writer, she followed her instincts and stepped into new territory.