“ Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. “Is there any place we’re not moving through?” she wonders. She is unsettled, but articulating that feeling helps propel her forward.

In an unusual literary and linguistic feat, the author of ?’Interpreter of Maladies?“ and ?’The Namesake?“ wrote her latest novel, ?’Whereabouts,?“ in Italian and translated it to English. The Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri in Princeton, N.J., April 15, 2021. 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. Eventually, we learn that the narrator is an only child whose unhappy upbringing has contributed to her current discontent. Although they ultimately assemble themselves into a plot, construction is slow. In brief chapters with locating titles - “In the Bookstore,” “In the Sun,” “At His Place,” etc. Lahiri builds the story in discrete pieces, like a mosaic. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.” “As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect.

“Solitude: it’s become my trade,” she thinks. She overhears conversations.īut within her “urban cocoon” (her phrase) she feels isolated. She has a few friends, an ex-lover, an almost lover. She has lived in or near this place her entire life. The novel is narrated by an unnamed middle-aged woman, living alone in an unnamed Italian city that could easily be Rome. “Whereabouts” is spare, distilled, stripped of the textural details of her earlier work but still concerned with identity and belonging, her constant themes. “Whereabouts” by Jhumpa Lahiri Photo: Knopf The novel was first published in 2018 under the title “Dove Mi Trovo,” which translates, most literally, to “Where I Am.” Her sixth book, “Whereabouts,” is now being released in English, but Lahiri wrote it in Italian. 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. In two story collections, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “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. Her characters moved halfway around the world, built families from arranged marriages, braved New England winters, kept old traditions alive and created new ones. Photo: Celeste Sloman, STR / The New York Timesįor most of her career, Jhumpa Lahiri filled her fiction with Indians living in America.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of “Interpreter of Maladies” and “The Namesake” wrote her latest novel, “Whereabouts,” in Italian and translated it to English.

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