Whereabouts

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 now and then as we re walking our synchronized bodies, already quite close, discreetly overlap.

One time 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.

Pleasant encounters like this break up our daily meanderings. We have a chaste, fleeting bond. As a result it can t advance, it can t take the upper hand. He s a good man, he loves my friend and their children.

I m content with a firm embrace even though I don t share my life with anyone. Two kisses on the cheeks, a short walk along a stretch of road. Without saying a word to each other we know that, if we chose to, we could venture into something reckless, also pointless.

This morning he s distracted. He doesn t recognize me until I m right in front of him. He s crossing a bridge at one end and I m arriving from the other. We stop in the middle and look at the wall that flanks the river, and the shadows of pedestrians cast on its surface. They look like skittish ghosts advancing in a row, obedient souls passing from one realm to another. The bridge is flat and yet it looks as if the figures &

woman at a crossroads in her life . . . The chapters detail encounters, but other humans are like passing shadows. The pain of the narrator s isolation feels extremely real.
Madeleine Thien, The New York Times Book Review

Lahiri s prose shimmers with precise detail. Whether it s an American-born son misunderstanding his Bengali father s wishes in The Namesake or an Indian guide seeing dangers that American tourists cannot in Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri has demonstrated that she is a master of cultural collisions. Whereabouts returns to her ever-present theme, now in an Italian setting, of the terrors and joys wrought by bridging worlds.
L.A. Taggart, San Francisco Chronicle

Fresh, unique . . . Lahiri [has] stretched the form of the novel. Wandering through an anonymous life, seeing things through one person s eyes, is enjoyable . . . At one point the narrator becomes as voyeuristic as her readers, following a stranger on the street and asking herself, What s her face like? Has she always lived here, like me? Each chapter floats by quickly, [with] sparse and lyrical prose.
Rob Merrill, Associated Press
 
Some books leave you with a feeling for which there are no words, or at least no words in English that you know of. Jhumpa Lahiri s Whereabouts is one of those books. The feeling closest to what is evoked by this beautifully crafted novel is a stroll during the blue hour on the first warm evening of spring. A jewel of a book.
Arlene McKanic, BookPage
  
Elegant . . . Lyrical . . . Beautiful.
Michael Magras, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A meditative and aching snapshot of a life in suspension... Lahiri s poetic flourishes and spare, conversational prose are on full display. This beautifully written portrait of a life in passage captures the hopes, frustrations, and longings of solitude and remembrance."
Publishers Weekly [starred review]

Painterly exquisitely detailed [Lahiri s] language seems to have been sieved through a fine mesh, each word a gleaming gemstone. Such expressive refinement perfectly embodies Lahiri s narrator, who lives alone in an unnamed Italian city [and] examines her life in first-person vignettes There is melancholy here, but these concentrated, poignant, and rueful episodes also pulse with the narrator's devotion to observation and her pushing through depression to live on her terms. She exalts in her lively neighborhood, in the country beneath skies as moody as she is, and by the tempestuous sea, all while recording her stealthy battle against her tendency to burrow into her shell. An incisive and captivating evocation of the nature and nexus of place and self.
Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Elegant, subtle, and sad... Its spare, reflective prose and profound interiority recall the work of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez."
Kirkus