title: Whereabouts by: Lahiri, Jhumpa published: 2021 read: 2021-07 preview

So, when one writes a book, isn’t it easiest to write about one’s own life and experiences, add some novelists’ liberties, and make a credible story? Certainly for first books? That is how I would go at it.

This book indeed feels very autobiographic.  It describes an author living in a city, apparently in Italy.  A sequence of seemingly disconnected chapters, but it’s a continuing story, about her life, her love, her work. 

The original novel Dove mi trovo written in Italian and published in 2018, and Lahiri translated it herself to English, which was the version I read. Italian, yes, surprising for an American novelist of Indian heritage, who taught herself Italian only a few years before? Or so I gather from her Wiki page.

The book is like windows into a soul, very cinematic indeed, and slowly you become her.  It opens:

In the mornings after breakfast I walk past a small marble plaque propped against the high wall flanking the road. I never knew the man who died. But over the years I’ve come to know his name, his surname. I know the month and day he was born and the month and day his life ended. This was a man who died two days after his birthday, in February.

and the first chapter, like a short story, fills but a page.

The book goes on with many shorter or longer stories. All connected, all describing the main character’s life, surroundings, people.

The book is beautiful in its use of language. It is never in the way of the stories, maximally smooth. Story 2:

Now and then on the streets of my neighborhood I bump into a man I might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with. He always looks happy to see me. He lives with a friend of mine, and they have two children. Our relationship never goes beyond a longish chat on the sidewalk, a quick coffee together, perhaps a brief stroll in the same direction. He talks excitedly about his projects, he gesticulates, and at times as we’re walking our synchronized bodies, already quite close, discreetly overlap.

Once he accompanied me into a lingerie shop because I had to choose a pair of tights to wear under a new skirt. I’d just bought the skirt and I needed the tights for that same evening. Our fingers grazed the textures splayed out on the counter as we sorted through the various colors. The binder of samples was like a book full of flimsy transparent pages. He was totally calm among the bras, the nightgowns, as if he were in a hardware store and not surrounded by intimate apparel. I was torn between the green and the purple. He was the one who convinced me to choose the purple, and the saleslady, putting the tights into the bag, said: Your husband’s got a great eye.

Summing up the book: Beautiful, recommendable.