Review of Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

*Whereabouts* by Jhumpa Lahiri (2021). Published by by Alfred A. Knopf.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

As a book blogger, something I’ve always been super clear about and dedicated towards promoting are local libraries. I know having access to a good library is a privilege, and there are countries where people don’t really have access to books at all. I am so grateful every day that I have access to a decent library system, especially in today’s world.

I am so incredibly grateful for my local library because a lot of what I read and review comes from my branch. I go almost every week to check out books in different locations, and I always end up finding something that I want to read throughout its large halls. It offers streaming platforms, and when I was writing my master’s thesis, I would use Libby for audiobooks.

This has been a habit that I’ve continued throughout my unemployed period, especially when I’m doing job applications. It helps take off the mundane grind of pressing applying and attaching resumes. I’ve been catching up on my reading goals by doing this as well, and one of the books I picked up through audio was Whereabouts.

I was able to finish it in two days because of how short the novel is, and I cranked out quite a bit of work during this time. Lahiri is always a delight to read, so I was happy with the fact this was available so soon and I could get through it.

Let’s get into the review!

Fragments of a life as a woman wanders through an unnamed Italian city.

Our main character in this novel has no name, and the city she wanders in also isn’t explicitly named. I kind of assumed from some of the context clues in the text that this might be Rome, as it’s a major city in Italy for sure, and some of the landmarks and geography implied to me that she was in Rome specifically.

Anyways, this woman is largely spending most of her time wandering and meandering throughout the streets by herself. I found this to be a novel about loneliness because of this, as there are various scenes scattered throughout the novel when she is engaging with other people.

It might be an ex-lover, or even her mother, but people have fleeting moments and memories with her in this plot. There are also ghosts at several different corners of the city, sparking that loneliness as she remembers what once was in her life when she sees these kinds of spaces.

There’s also the question of what her life was like a child, as we can see her upbringing wasn’t the best to begin with. With quarreling parents and a lack of the attention she needed at times, we can kind of see the blueprint of how she got here to us in this moment.

As she drifts from space to space, contemplating what it means to her now in this moment or in a not-so-distant past, this becomes a novel that serves as a character study. I wondered how much of Lahiri she inserted into this woman, which is a natural inclination when reading books like these, as Lahiri left behind the US to live and write in Rome, now choosing to write in Italian instead.

This was a novel in translation, although Lahiri is American and largely wrote in English before this, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Books in translation are always interesting to me in the sense that I wonder what’s lost when the book is translated.

As someone who informally does Bangla and Korean literature into English for myself, I inherently know about what’s lost when we translate something into another language. There’s a certain intimacy and nuance that’s incredibly difficult to translate, and most readers might not even realize that.

Overall Thoughts

I think this was a well-written novel, and I kind of knew what to expect going into it, but I think I still had different expectations because I was very familiar with Lahiri’s other works. I enjoyed listening to it, as her prose is always so gorgeous and crisp, the details fine tuned to the story she’s trying to convey.

However, I didn’t connect with this book as much as I wanted to. That said, I think there is definitely a solid demographic for this book, but I might not have been in the right mindset or the right age to fully appreciate what I was listening to in this moment.

I truly believe in returning to books if I know that it might be the right fit in the future, so I do want to come back to this book when a few years have passed to see how my feelings have changed. I believe that if you think this is a book that might interest you, you should definitely check it out at a library or go to your local indie bookstore.

Taste is so incredibly subjective, and what I might not love could be your favorite book. And that’s fine—neither of us are wrong. So give this a chance if you’re interested in it!

Follow me below on Instagram, Goodreads, and Letterboxd for more.