WHEREABOUTS  (2021)

By Jhumpa Lahiri

Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf, 157 pages

★★ ½

 

 

 

Whereabouts is an unusual piece of writing. It has been highly praised by critics for its literary merits. That's not always a good thing; sometimes it means a book appeals to elites and self-identified intellectuals more than a general readership. In the case of this Jhumpa Lahiri work, there's truth in both interpretations.

 

Whereabouts is indeed elegantly written, but it stretches the definition of a novel. It often reads as if its intent might be more obvious to Lahiri to anyone outside of a lit crit graduate seminar. I call it more of a meditation or an extended prose poem than a conventional work of fiction.

 

The narrator – perhaps Lahiri’s avatar – meanders through an unnamed Italian city. The narrative centers on themes of movement and stasis, but in each case the female narrator is metaphorically adrift. When she “travels,” it is usually within the city – to a park, the rail station, a museum, a shop, a café, or, appropriately, a stationary store. We infer that she is lonely and goes to public places to alleviate that feeling, though the encounters she has (if any) in such places are superficial and brief. She is more of an observer than a participant, almost as if she wants to be part of a display or the decor rather than thrust herself amidst any sort of collective encounter. She describes her trip to the stationer’s thusly,

 

Even when I don't need anything in particular, I stop in front of the window to admire the display, which always appears so festive, decked with backpacks, scissors, tacks, glue, Scotch tape, and piles of little notebooks, with and without lines on their pages. I'd like to fill them all up, even the unwelcoming accounts ledger. Even though I can't draw, I'd like one of those sketchbooks, hand bound, with thick cream-colored paper.

 

Though she doesn’t seem to desire as to be the kind of person who might, she draws comfort from the familiar and is unsettled to learn that the shop has changed ownership. She's even more shaken by a display of hard-shell suitcases:

 

I grew sad looking at all those brand-new suitcases, all of them are empty, waiting for a traveler, waiting for various things to fill them, waiting for someplace to go. There's nothing else for sale. Just suitcases. But then, right at the entrance, I noticed a bunch of umbrellas, big ones and small ones, of the cheapest quality, bait for tourists caught in a downpour, those pathetic umbrellas that almost always end up in the garbage can after the storm, shoved in with a certain fury, looking like tortured herons.

 

Later, and in a chapter titled “Nowhere,” she reflects upon movement:

 

 

 

I've never stayed still, 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. I keep packing and unpacking the small suitcase at my feet. I hold my purse in my lap, it's got some money in a book to read. Is there any place we're not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, adrift, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. [Emphasis hers.]

 

Yes, it's this kind of book. In my reading there is a subtext of existential dread in Whereabouts. This book is noteworthy because it's the first time Lahiri has written in Italian and has done her own translation. I'll be candid; I'm not quite sure of what I think about this work. The closest I come is to observe that I was greatly impressed by it, but did not find it very engaging. You might feel differently and, at just 157 pages, you can travel through it rapidly.

 

Rob Weir