A tiny novel about everything and nothing.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this little ‘story’ of urban loneliness. 150 pages of nuanced prose that reads like a poem. Constructed of the fewest words possible in order to cut to the core of what their writer meant to convey: the outer dialogue of a single woman with her surroundings as she goes through the motions of her every day life; and the deeply rich inner monologue that accompanies this same existence.The place is an unnamed city, somewhere in Italy; it could be Rome bu...

I was very impressed by this reading, I didn’t really think to find pages and pages of complete loneliness and melancholy....Jhumpa lists many places where we w will find her female character ( unknown name) by giving an accurate description of the actions and feelings felt in that particular place.What unites all the pages is this sense of total abandonment to the impossibility of enjoying life, everything is crushed by this dark and sad vision of oblivion and sadness.A total solitude that sinc...

Library overdrive...Audiobook....read by Susan Vinciotti Bonito 3 hours and 23 minutes “When there was nothing left to say, we went out for a meal” Nice plan! I have little to say about this book — kinda neutral ..........It gave me the moody blues. ....I’d like a nap now! The writing was filled with pretty words .....and sentences.....but I keep having thoughts that Lahiri is practicing her Italian writing on us while hoping her past reputation will hold long enough until she gets her groove ba...

A middle aged woman, never named, in an unknown city, this book contains over 40 vignettes. The woman is a people watcher, a depressive and wants to connect with others, but also loves her solitude. An internal rendering of daily events in a life, she explains what she does and what she thinks, about events, and people. Does she want more, less? She's not certain and so neither are we the readers. A plotless book, there is no clear path to the denouement. What does it all mean? Her first book in...

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | |re-read: I was curious to read Lahiri's self-translation, just to see whether I would like it us much as the original, and I can confirm that I did. I'm glad Lahiri translated the novel herself and I can't actually decide if I preferred this English translation or its original Italian version. Anyway, I loved re-experiencing the story through a different lens. Dove mi trovo, which will be published in English as Whereabouts next spring, is the first novel Jhumpa L...

Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, severed, turned around. I spring from these terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold. This novella was written by the Booker shortlisted (and Pulitzer Prize winning) author Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian, a language with which she has said that she fell in love since first visiting the country in 1994 prior to moving to Rome), one in which she has written and from which she has translated (most noticably a novel by

The unnamed protagonist of Whereabouts is a 40-something-year-old Italian woman. The short entries are very much like pages of a diary. Each tells about a person she knows or a place she has gone, often with recollections of her unhappy childhood. There is no plot, rather inconsequential observations by this mysterious woman of solitude.Although Lahiri's writing is sparse and the book is short, I felt her observations were very poignant. Lahiri is one of those writers who can convey much with fe...

sonder (n.) the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your ownA meditative, slow-moving read compiling mundane moments in life that may seem unimportant but actually hold value. The ending felt a bit abrupt, but I love novels like this, just rich with descriptions and very introspective

La solitudineWhereabouts - Dove mi trovo - my first foray into Jhumpa Lahiri’s work turned out to be her first novel she has written in Italian since she moved from the US to Rome, chose to leave English behind and to write exclusively in Italian instead. When I was reading the book (in Dutch), it had been published already in Italian, Spanish and Dutch, but not yet in English. Other than for her bilingual book In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri announced that this time she would self-translate her f...

Whereabouts takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. Reading this book is like reading art. This book is beyond beautiful, the writing is precise, moving, and gives you this calming effect that you are exactly where you need to be. In Whereabouts we follow a woman who is a professor at a university, Lahiri takes us through her daily wonderings to the supermarket, vacation, pool and friend’s dinner. We get the inner workings of her mind, how she views herself, the people and the world ar

Oh this one pains me. I love reading Lahiri's books. One of her books is in my top all time favorites. She is an author that I beg my library for her books without even reading what they are about. I did the same her, but in the end, I was disappointed with this one.Whereabouts seemed like someone was reading diary entries to me. A middle aged woman, unnamed, living in some city (probably somewhere in Italy) tells her 'stories' of her daily encounters. No real story there, just pieces of thought...

Novel doesn't feel like the correct descriptor for this slim and delicate self-portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Fictional Memoir or Dramatized Journal, perhaps. But whereas the plot is slender, the story is as fat and ripe and juicy as a late summer Italian plum. An unnamed narrator in an unnamed Italian city recounts a year in her life through a series of short, simple, quiet vignettes, each stamped by a "whereabout" in her life: In the Hotel; By the Sea; In My Head, At

Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Italy in 2011 and it shifted her writing life as well. This book was published in Italy in 2018 as "Dove mi trovo," which translates as "Where I find myself." It was translated into English by the author and published in 2021.I read it because it was selected for the summer Camp ToB for the Tournament of Books. The audio is only 3.5 hours so the print must be very short.It feels like Cusk or Levy or anyone who writes short autofiction. It's composed of short slice of life