Other Words and Inner Worlds
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts is a novel of contradictions and duality, straddling an oppressive loneliness and a contented solitude, reclusiveness and intimacy, emptiness and fulfilment.
An overwhelming loneliness presses down on each page of Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, Whereabouts. We encounter the narrator walking alone across the city’s piazzas, eating lunch by herself at the same trattoria every day, buying single tickets to concerts, and making the routine purchases of a woman on her own at the supermarket. There are times when her loneliness is suffused with an intense longing. At other times, it transforms into a peaceful solitude. For the most part, however, Lahiri’s novella-length book of fiction hums with a quiet desperation, anxiety, and weariness.
This is the third novel for the Bengali-American author who shot to fame after her 1999 debut collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize. She followed it up with her first novel The Namesake in 2003, another short story collection Unaccustomed Earth in 2008, and a second novel The Lowland in 2013. The daughter of Bengali immigrant parents who moved to the United States when she was two or three years old, Lahiri’s early work remained singularly preoccupied with the South Asian diasporic experience. The dislocation produced by diasporic movements, imbued with loneliness and longing, and experienced as “a perpetual wait, a constant burden” was the overarching theme of her first four books.
As a second-generation immigrant, Lahiri’s own sense of dislocation was produced through language. Growing up in Rhode Island with frequent trips to Calcutta, Bengali was her mother tongue and “paradoxically, a foreign language too”. It was a language she had to necessarily speak at home with her parents, but one in which she could neither read nor write. English, the language in which she was educated, turned her into a passionate reader but was also like a “stepmother”. It represented constant struggle, conflict, and a sense of failure. Suspended between these contradictions, Lahiri recalls existing as “a kind of linguistic exile”, “outside” of the languages she grew up with.
The narrator takes on the role of the literary flâneur, chronicling the scene unfolding before her while remaining detached from it herself. “Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect.”
It is from this place of conflict and estrangement with two languages which were always “incompatible adversaries, intolerant of each other” that she began her association with Italian, a language she neither inherited nor grew up with. After studying it on and off for many decades, Lahiri moved to Rome with her family in 2012 and began to write only in Italian. Her first book in Italian was published in 2015 and translated to English by Ann Goldstein (who is famous as Elena Ferrante’s translator) a year later. Lahiri herself describes this book, In Other Words, as “a sort of linguistic autobiography” documenting her escape from her own failures and successes in English and the adoption of a “different literary path”.
Whereabouts is the second book in her journey of literary transformation. Self-translated by the author, it was first published in Italian in 2018 with the title Dove mi trovo, which roughly means to “Where I am” or “Where I Find Myself”.
Lahiri’s first four books explored questions of identity and belonging while being rooted in the South Asian immigrant experience, and her first Italian publication traced the author’s own dislocation from and self-reinvention through language. Whereabouts, however, departs from the author’s previous body of work in both content and structure. Things are much more diffuse here. The narrative carries the imprint of a memoir and could have been a set of connected short stories, but its formal structure is closest to an episodic novel. Through a series of short vignettes that read like diary entries, Whereabouts follows a 40-something unnamed woman in an unnamed city. Lahiri’s narrator is an abstract figure, curiously stripped of any sense of place and cultural context. Readers surmise that she is in an Italian city because she is often addressed as “Signora” and “dottoressa”, and from regular references to the piazza and the trattoria. The passage of seasons signal that the novel unfolds over the course of a year. Besides these minor hints, the book eschews all specificity—in names, places, and time. To be sure, this does not come as a surprise. In her memoir, In Other Words, Lahiri had observed that with Italian she was moving “towards abstraction”, writing about undefined places and nameless characters.
The Narrator as the Literary Flâneur
And so, all we know of the narrator in Whereabouts is that she’s a writer who lives alone, teaches at a local university, and leads a somewhat reclusive life. Stripped down to the essentials, the text makes room for the narrator to meditate on the loneliness and solitude of her pared-down existence. She runs into friends and lovers as she criss-crosses the city, visits her mother, and occasionally attends the odd dinner party, but remains a firmly solitary figure. In these episodes, the narrator takes on the role of the literary flâneur, chronicling the scene unfolding before her while remaining detached from it herself. “Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect,” the narrator writes. She perfects it as she looks at art at the museum, visits her favourite stationery store, goes on vacations, ensconced each time in a jealously-guarded solitude.
It is only with great reluctance that she lets people into her solitary existence. Often, these are tense encounters, leaving the narrator annoyed, nervous, or full of regret. Sharing a meal with a friend’s daughter, a young girl with an easy smile and “a beauty that is disarming”, the narrator is reminded of her own “squandered youth, the absence of rebellion.” She is visibly annoyed by a friend’s “pompous” husband when she hosts the couple at her home and “feels separate from the group” when she attends the baptism of a colleague’s child somewhere along the coast. The text is awash with an almost palpable sense of relief as these encounters end. “[I]n spite of the silence, in spite of the lights I never switch off when I leave the house, along with the radio I always keep playing,” the narrator writes, “I’m grateful to be on my own, to be in charge of my space and my time.” Yet, there are times when she is filled with a longing for an alternate life and the need for intimacy. In the second chapter “On the Street”, the narrator runs into the husband of a friend, a man whom she “might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with”.
Then there are moments when oppressive loneliness gives way to a welcome, contented solitude. These episodes are suffused with a rare warmth, at odds with the icy distance of the rest of the novel. In a particularly cheery chapter, “In the Sun”, the narrator is filled with “a sense of well-being, of euphoria” as she sits at the piazza on a summer’s day, eating a sandwich. “As I eat it, as my body bakes in the sun that pours down on my neighborhood, each bite, feeling sacred, reminds me that I’m not forsaken,” she writes. At other times, chance encounters lead to moments of connection with strangers, however fleeting. The narrator forms a reticent but “tacit bond” with a well-known philosopher at an academic conference. Over three days, they wait for each other every morning and evening at the elevator, without ever exchanging a word. Small things too elicit “small pleasures”. The narrator describes with obvious fondness the stationery store she has been frequenting since childhood, to get supplies for school, later for college, and now for teaching. She is distraught when, without warning, it is turned into a store that sells suitcases and the family that used to run it is nowhere to be found.
An Austere Prose
The careful and precise prose that marks the rest of Lahiri’s oeuvre are evident in this book too. But here, the language borders on the austere. Besides the lack of geographic and cultural specificity, the narrative can often feel strangely fragmented and disinterested. Friends and past and present lovers file past quickly. Even when they reappear, they remain relative strangers. In one chapter, the narrator vaguely mentions “protests downtown” and “helicopters...circling the city all morning” and then immediately proceeds to describe a summer’s day “when the piazza becomes a beach”. It’s a passage that led one reviewer to conclude that “the novel’s hypnotically surgical gleam can verge on bleached sterility”.
Specificity emerges in the narrator’s tenuous relationship with her parents. Despite the economy of her words, Lahiri convincingly portrays an unhappy childhood, an intrusive and oppressive mother who protects the narrator from solitude “as if it were a nightmare”, and an emotionally-distant father whose sudden death leaves her with unresolved anger, unable to mourn and unwilling to forgive. Over time, we realise that the narrator’s studied detachment arises, at least in part, from these fractures.
This lopsided power relation embedded in language that determines who must necessarily adopt English and who can choose to eschew it, is something Lahiri never engages with… [her] romanticised escape from English and “infatuation” with Italian remains completely unmoored from these realities.
Family, Language, and Loneliness
Loneliness has always been a recurring motif in Lahiri’s work. With Italian, she has moved away from the immigrant experience of loneliness and longing—author Sanjena Sathian calls them her “good immigrant novels”—but these themes continue to imbue her work in familiar ways. In The Namesake, both Ashima and Gogol experience estrangement within their immigrant family in their own ways. The Lowland is constructed around the absence of Udayan as the rest of the family conduct their lives around his missing presence. The same tense encounter with family plays out in Whereabouts as the narrator’s loneliness (or defiant solitude) is a carefully-crafted response to a childhood fractured between a mother’s overbearing attention and a father’s lack of affection. Lahiri may have freed her narrator from culture and geography, but she is unable to escape the entanglements of family.
Loneliness also springs from the shifting encounters with language. The end of Whereabouts loosely mirrors Lahiri’s decision to move to Rome for an extended period and her struggle to convincingly adopt and write in a new language. The narrator who has never left the city she lives in prepares to move to another country “on the other side of the border” where she cannot speak the language. The loss of familiar surroundings and language leaves her feeling “[d]isoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around” even as she recognises these terms as her only “abode” and “foothold”. It is a journey undertaken with both apprehension and hope. And it is here that the novel once again echoes Ashima and Ashoke’s journey from Calcutta to Cambridge in The Namesake, as well as the migrations and border crossings recounted in The Interpreter of Maladies.
These journeys—of the author, the novel’s narrator, and the protagonists and characters of these other books—are not the same, and yet are marked with similar tensions between rootedness and rootlessness, belonging and unbelonging. For the traveler(s), these journeys produce a similar sense of dislocation and induce the same loneliness and longing.
Ultimately, Whereabouts is a novel of contradictions (or dualities). The narrator straddles an oppressive loneliness and a contented solitude, alternates between remaining reclusive and craving intimacy, and moves between emptiness and fulfilment. The book itself deals with the mundane details of everyday life, but remains oddly devoid of cultural specificities.
The Politics of Adopting or Eschewing English
The commentary that surrounds any book must necessarily go beyond what is strictly within its pages to engage with the context in which it was written. In the case of Whereabouts, the commentary has been dominated by Lahiri’s adoption of a new language. To an extent, this was set in motion by the author herself, documenting extensively her engagement with a new language and her evolving literary journey. Her first book in Italian, In Other Words, is very much the author writing about writing her first book in Italian—understandable, since as it is a memoir. Whereabouts, however, is a self-contained novel, but following its publication Lahiri has penned an extended reflection on her decision to self-translate the book, a journey she describes as a “bewildering, paradoxical going backward and moving forward at once”.
Lahiri’s navigation of a whole new literary terrain is no mean feat. But the almost obsessive focus on what Vogue calls “her love affair with the Italian language” is nevertheless a bit overdone. The question of language and translation is something that writers working in Global South contexts have engaged with for decades. This is especially true for writers located in countries that were former colonies and those who write predominantly in regional languages. For them, adopting a different language—and invariably, this is the coloniser’s language—is much more than a journey of literary discovery, it is a necessary act of literary survival. This is not to take away from Lahiri’s literary achievements, but rather to point out that similar endeavours have for long been undertaken by many postcolonial writers. Explaining his decision to write Things Fall Apart in English rather than his native Igbo, Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe asks, “Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal, and produces a guilty feeling.” But for the postcolonial writer, he concludes, “there is no other choice”.
This lopsided power relation embedded in language that determines who must necessarily adopt English and who can choose to eschew it, is something Lahiri never engages with: neither in her memoir nor in her essay about writing and self-translating Whereabouts. Lahiri’s romanticised escape from English and “infatuation” with Italian remains completely unmoored from these realities. Paradoxically, this singular focus has meant that the conversation on the impressiveness of writing (and self-translating) the book has overwhelmed and engulfed engagements with the book itself.
That said, Lahiri’s literary transition from English to Italian is a useful frame of reference through which to interpret the theme of loneliness in Whereabouts. Italian offers Lahiri an escape from her lifelong status as a linguistic exile. The author herself is unclear about where this flight may end, but she does find in Italian “an independent path”. For Lahiri’s narrator too, the desire to move to a new country where she does not know the language may have something to do with shaking off the loneliness that marks her present. For both the author and her narrator then, following unfamiliar paths may be the antidote to loneliness.
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Sohel Sarkar is an independent writer, editor, and feminist researcher currently based in Bengaluru. Her work has appeared in Himal Southasian, Bitch Media, Whetstone Magazine, and Color Bloq, among others. You can find her on Twitter: @SohelS28 and Instagram: @sarkar.sohel10.
