Fiction

WHEREABOUTS

JHUMPA LAHIRI

Bloomsbury, 176pp, £14.99

Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her short stories in 2000. Twenty years later, having moved to Rome, she swapped her native language for Italian to write Dove mi trovo; ‘I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer,’ she said of herself. Lahiri translated her novel herself and gave it the more alienating title of Whereabouts. Its 46 short chapters describe a single woman’s life and create a mosaic of narrative.

‘I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer,’ Lahiri said of herself

For Anthony Cummins in the , ‘part of the book’s peculiar magnetism lies in its clash of candour and coyness’. The observations ‘land like plot twists’. He found Lahiri’s spare writing style ‘a mark of how the novel’s hypnotically surgical gleam can verge on bleached sterility’. Writing in the , Lucy Atkins agreed. ‘Perhaps this sounds outrageously dull? It isn’t. It is oddly compelling. The narrator vibrates with unexpressed emotion,