Today the new novel ‘Whereabouts’ from the Pulitzer-winning and Booker-shortlisted Jhumpa Lahiri is out.
Written in Italian, but translated into English by the author herself, it reads like a memoir.
We follow a middle-aged, solemn woman through an unnamed, ‘run-down’ city. She takes us in short bursts of observative descriptions through the places that belong to her routine days – the street she walks on, where she often encounters the man she didn’t marry, the cafe where she orders the same delicious sandwich three times a week, the bookstore she goes to, her teaching office, her balcony.
Her balcony overlooks a piazza that is lively and full of people, in a neighbourhood that ‘is always spectacular.’ She knows the butcher, the baker, the barista (‘the person I confide all sorts of things to, though I couldn’t tell you why’), the other merchants, and these casual relationships sustain her both physically and emotionally. She is a sidewalk observer of the spectacle of life in the piazza, which provides her with enough human contact, food, and routine to help her through her solitude, which ‘became her trade’, ‘a condition she tries to perfect’.
Her life has not been a particularly happy one. She grew up with an oppressive mother and a stingy father, who loved theatre, and for her fifteenth birthday booked tickets to treat her, but got very sick the day before and ‘instead of going to see a play with him, I sat at his wake.’ Still, she inherited his love for the theatre and her social calendar is filled by bookings to see a play or an opera, which she always pays for in advance and wonders if she is going to make it to the performance, since her dad never did.
Her orderly, spartan life is incapable of accommodating others for a long time. Even though she is a good friend and a kind person, she is too mature to submit to chafing her ego to compromise fitting with another one.
Still, it is not the solitude that asks for pity, but rather one that so often provides nutritious soil for other things to grow. It may not fit into the template of a typically desirable bourgeois lifestyle, but so do not most of the things that deserve being noted.