Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set in an Italian city, each brief chapter offers a slice of life of the narrator, a forty-something unmarried woman as she goes about her daily life: dinner parties with friends; running into a certain man she likes, who is married to a friend; visiting her elderly mother in another town. In each chapter she explores her sense of self – a person detached from the typical life of spouse and children, pets and home-ownership; a person who prefers to stay in her place, her town, rather than venture out into something new and strange. A person who reflects on her relationship to her distant, measured father, and her angry mother. Who grew up with a sense of falling short. Of her father, she thinks, “You always wanted calm seas. You used to claim that you got along with everyone, that you kept to yourself, that you needed nothing from no one. But one can’t ask the sea to never swell into rage” (147). As she says, “There’s no escape from the shadows that mount, inexorably, in this darkening season. Nor can we escape the shadows our families cast” (112). Voyeuristically, she looks on at her friend and the man she likes, even following them on one occasion; only when she pet-sits for them during an emergency do the feelings of envy diminish, replaced by a sense of the mundane. At the end of the novel, she prepares to leave for a year for a fellowship in a new place. Walking along the street before leaving, she sees a woman dressed exactly like herself, and follows her. “My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I’m me and also someone else, that I’m leaving and also staying” (151). This phrase, that one can both leave and stay, gave me a measure of comfort, knitting the past and the present together, stasis and change. Because in moving forward, we also do not leave the past behind.



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