‘Whereabouts’ is a collection of snapshots wherein we follow an unnamed character as she spends her time in an unspecified Italian city that she loves and has lived in for a long time.
Jhumpa Lahiri writes this book by piercing together fragments from her notebook that she carries around with her wherever she goes. Her stories, she claims begin on scraps of paper such as receipts and the backs of envelopes. I agree with those who describe the prose in this book as “Elegant’
This collection consists of over forty shorts, the titles of which are along the lines of “On the street,” “The Stationery Shop,” “At Down,” and so on. Reading this book, we see the world through this character’s eyes, we meet the people she describes meeting and we see the sights she sees.
Remember all those moments when you and I traveled on public transport or went on a long train ride but didn’t really observe the passing scenery or the people seated around you? Well, Jhumpa does observe and observes them well. She lets her mind wonder as she weaves from her imagination what their back stories might be. I feel like I connected with this better as a couple of years ago, I was able to visit the Italian cities of Rome, Florence and Venice so I could immediately picture things in a setting that felt apt for these stories. Since, I too love Italy and the time I spent there, I really enjoyed this book. But I’m not sure how other readers will approach the same stories. For me, it honestly felt like I revisited the country by reading this book.
Lahiri describes the mundane but has an ability to hold and focus our attention on it. The narrator is initially pessimistic in her world view and comes across as full of contradiction. The narrator wants things but when they come her way, she turns the other cheek. She is complex and that, (Lahiri says in a video interview I watched) is synonymous with human nature and how complicated humans are and how we inhabit shades of grey at all times. In ‘Whereabouts’ we see things from the narrator’s perspective and for a while it was nice to abandon myself and surroundings and escape to another setting and experience things differently through the power of words.
Speaking of structure and style, she fails not to impress and I was just as captivated by her writing as I was when I read her memoir In Other Words. In some senses, I think these two books can be teamed as a pair to be read one after the other. Jhumpa says she wrote this book before leaving Italy for a whole year where she was asked to go work in the United States again after a long gap. The narrator is vocal about how she identifies with the culture and sees the Italian people as her friends. She not once feels lonely in the city even though she is essentially alone. She is conscious of what happens around her, in shops, in parks, in trains. The narrator claims to leave herself behind and theres a part of the book where she says that even though she is not physically going to inhabit these same spaces, she feels connected to them still and will leave behind a version of herself.
The warmth of he Italian people comes through and she captures well the callousness with which they approach relationships and the chill manner in which they approach different aspects of life. And yet, some things are universal when it comes to the ways humans experience life.
My favourite story was the final one where she talks about the group of five friends she sees inside her train compartment. They are foreigns and are constantly eating. This is something almost everyone has witnessed at one point or other in our life. As an episode, it is universal and yet interesting and full of possibility. I also liked the first story where she talks about feeling connected to a person she does not have access to intimately. She does not feel like they can ever share intimacy and yet in the act of looking at the shadows of pedestrians walking by reflected on a wall, they have created an experience that they alone will share forever.
So in this book Jhumpa seems to explore the intimacy shared by strangers, the connections forged between them and how one is able to feel connected to a place because of its people. The happy smiling baker who is positive about the sand-which he gives her each day, being the absolute best one he has made so far. I think the collection is elegant because its focus is on the minutiae. Her words feel like satin and leave an impression on your skin the way satin feels when it brushes against you almost seductively. Her words work with that less is more approach, they are measured but they leave a lasting impression. If you miss traveling and being in a different city. If you want to understand loneliness/isolation in a new way. If you want to experience human nature in a way you have not before, pick up this book.
Verdict: 5/5 stars
Bookish Bulletin 