Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Whereabouts’ is a chronicle of pain and solitude

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Rajesh Sharma

Her face has always disappointed her. Spring brings her suffering. She regrets she never experienced youthful rebellion. She never married but has had ‘her share of married men’. She teaches language, writes, wears her hair long, and watches trashy TV programmes while waxing her legs.

She is a single woman passing though a midlife crisis, negotiating between loneliness and solitude, and wrestling with ‘embedded fears’. An anonymous woman in an unnamed European city, she is the protagonist and narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Whereabouts’. The writer makes her vividly alive with minimal strokes.

Lahiri was awarded the Pulitzer for fiction way back in 2000. She returns to the genre after several years, having tasted blood, which non-fiction generously affords. So this is not exactly a return, but a moving on. Not all novels are, of course, fictional. ‘Whereabouts’, too, probably is not. It belongs among the works that stretch and bend genres and help create new forms of writing, like Deborah Levy’s ‘Things I Don’t Know’, Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s ‘The Last Days of Mandelstam’, Peter Handke’s ‘A Sorrow beyond Dreams’, Olivia Laing’s ‘The Insomniac City’, or Max Porter’s ‘Grief is the Thing with Feathers’. Its formal austerity and delicacy suggest immense artistic riches quietly absorbed and not put on display.

A good translation has been called a second original. Can a translation be a parallel original? Probably yes. Lahiri wrote this book in Italian, a language she decided to grow into, having plumbed her depths in English. If we are our language, one way of realising our possibilities is that we try reincarnation in another language. Rilke did this when he turned to French. But Lahiri takes a step more: she translates her own book into English. An accidental fruit of the adventure is her refreshed, sensuous handling of some less used words, like a child’s attempts at discovering things through touch and relish.

Lahiri calls the book a novel. The reader could well treat it as a collection of 46 personal essays, or a memoir. Frames pass before you like a train’s windows at night, each enfolding a story. Some frames return, the stories having moved on. Circularities, like sequences, are partial, wilfully disrupted. There are no certitudes, yet the anonymous woman might be the writer and the city Rome. The hints are telling.

For the entire length — and depth — of this novel of some 40,000 words, you inhabit a single consciousness which flits between memory, perception and reflection. But you do not feel confined, perhaps because you oscillate between soliloquy and dramatic monologue (in which you are the interlocutor). You become a co-traveller and endure the pain of being set free. When you awake from the novel, you are calmer, less anxious to focus. Replenished.

Her crisis is articulated in the constricting vocabulary she repeatedly uses as a handle on her condition. Focus, defeat, depletion. Her mind bounces between these words as her body suffers the sun’s drying lick and she chases an elusive catharsis. She has to resolve her relationship with her parents. The father, dead, continues to rule her life, even popping up between her lover and her. The mother, old and frail but not senile, dispenses the wisdom she sorely needs. But this mother had wounded her tender confidence as a child. Anyway, she can forgive her, but the father?

A turning point is her encounter with a headless cadaver. The fresh blood frightens and repels her but it also reminds her of the delicious red fig. A duality is uncannily resolved. Later, she sees her double and understands that she can be she and also another.

The book begins on a street and ends on a train, begins with a death remembered and ends with a departure of which not even ‘the crumbs’ remain. The whereabouts are nowhere except in moving. One never is in a place. One only moves through it.