Whereabouts : a review

Book Title: Whereabouts

Author : Jhumpa Lahiri

Published by: Penguin

Price : 499/_

I quite like reading Jhumpa Lahiri since the first book I read-- Interpreter of Maladies , for which she was awarded the presitigious Pulitzar Prize. Then came her more works on fiction-- The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland whom I have successfully gobbled up all in one go.

She has also published a work on non- fiction named-- In Other Words. Since then I was like waiting for her next book. This one - Whereabouts though was published in the year 2018, but I came to know about it quite recently when I had read an article about it in the net.

It is a novel... but with a twist. This book has no specific plot, though it has many characters but none of them has a name! The author has done experiments with its settings too. In short, this beautiful novel is about an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city.

The time period is covered over the arc of one year, the protagonist is in the middle of her life's journey ( we are told that she is around 45 ) and she realizes that she has lost her away in life.

The cover of the book reveals,"Whereabouts celebrates ordinary life and community while exploring existential themes of presence and absence. "

Lahiri's narrator is a single woman who lives in an unnamed European city, where she often visits places like - parks, museums, piazas, stores, coffee bars etc. She also visits her mother who lives in another city trapped in her own solitude after her husband's death. Lahiri's narrator teaches in a college and her day to day existence, her likings and dislikings serve as a subject of novel.

Whereabouts is Lahiri's first novel written in Italian -- Dove Mitrovo, which for the first time she has self-translated a full- length work.

The qualities that make Lahiri's work so beloved is her "deep intellegence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes and a poetics dislocation. But this novel, a play of shadow and light, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility, and an artist reveling in a new form."