Whereabouts

December 1, 2020

Written in Italian and translated by the author into English, Lahiri's first novel since 2013's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Lowland follows a woman over a year as she restlessly walks her city, finding some solace in the streets, bars, and piazzas. But she's torn between wanting and resisting connection to others, including a mysterious man readers know only as "him." A stylistic and ideational game changer.

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Starred review from January 18, 2021
The latest from Pulitzer winner Lahiri (The Interpreter of Maladies) is a meditative and aching snapshot of a life in suspension. The unnamed narrator, a single, middle-aged woman, lives a quiet life in an unnamed Italian city, ambling between cafes and storefronts, dinner parties with friends, and a leisurely career as a writer and teacher. The tranquil surface of her life belies a deeper unrest: a frayed, distant relationship with her widowed mother, romantic longings projected onto unavailable friends, and constant second-guessing of the paths her life has taken. The novel is told in short vignettes introducing a new scene and characters whose relationships are fertile ground for Lahiri’s impressive powers of observation. In a museum, for instance, sunlight refracted through the glass roof “brightens and darkens the room in turns. It’s a panorama that makes me think of the sea, of swimming in a clear blue patch underwater.” Throughout, Lahiri’s poetic flourishes and spare, conversational prose are on full display. This beautifully written portrait of a life in passage captures the hopes, frustrations, and longings of solitude and remembrance.

February 15, 2021
Lahiri's passion for Italian inspired her to write In Other Words (2016), her first nonfiction book, in that language; to translate two novels by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, and to write this novel in Italian, then translate it into English. The result of this process is language that seems to have been sieved through a fine mesh, each word a gleaming gemstone. Such expressive refinement perfectly embodies Lahiri's unnamed, solitary narrator, a woman in her forties who teaches at a university and lives alone in an unnamed Italian city. Declaring, "Solitude: it's become my trade," she examines her life in first person vignettes, each yoked to her whereabouts in chapters with such titles as "In the Piazza," "In My Head," and "On the Couch." There is melancholy here, but these concentrated, exquisitely detailed, poignant, and rueful episodes also pulse with the narrator's devotion to observation and her pushing through depression to live on her terms. She muses over her "unhappy origins" and recounts her disappointing love life, but she also exalts in her lively neighborhood, in the country beneath skies as moody as she is, and by the tempestuous sea, all while recording her stealthy battle against her tendency to burrow into her shell. With a painterly interplay of light and shadows, Lahiri creates an incisive and captivating evocation of the nature and nexus of place and self.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lahiri's acclaim and literary intrepidness will lure fiction lovers to her first novel since The Lowland (2013), a Man Booker finalist.

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