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I picked this up the last time I was at the bookshop – I’m still so excited by the idea of being able to select from real physical books in an actual shop I have been tending to get a bit carried away with my purchases recently. Anyone else had that problem?
But happily, this proved to be an excellent choice. I was in the middle of half-term week which was a busy family time and though I’d bought this on impulse I hadn’t expected to be reading it.
But from the very first page I was captivated – so much so that I found myself stealing away whenever I could to read a few more pages. Partly it was the writing style, which is so beautifully poised reading it it felt like a kind of meditation. Lahiri wrote it in Italian (not her first language) and then translated it into English – perhaps this accounts for the way every word seems so beautifully weighted. I was also drawn in because of its themes: ‘Solitude’ she writes, ‘it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect’ which fitted nicely with my yearning to have some time for myself.
It seems to sit in that genre of fiction writing – auto-fiction – that is drawn from the writer’s own life. It is narrated by an unmarried woman living alone in an unnamed Italian city. We learn of her daily routine, her office at the university where she works, her interactions with friends and acquaintances, where she eats lunch. It’s full of small observations that in less expert hands might seem boring but here are somehow compelling. Details of her difficult relationship with her parents, her mother still living, her father long gone, adds a darker undercurrent that stops it feeling frivolous or throwaway.
Reading a few reviews I was surprised to see one critic categorise it as a book about depression, something I’d definitely sensed within the book, but I wouldn’t have said was a major theme. Thinking back over it I remembered the scene where the author explains that she struggles in spring, finding there are days when she doesn’t want to get out of bed, and other scenes where she visits a therapist. It seemed to me that her depression was woven in as just one more facet of a person’s life, something as much a part of her as her teaching and where she chose to eat lunch – and I liked this way of writing about it.
It’s a hard book to sum up. I finished it and wasn’t quite sure what I had just read, only that I’d loved the experience of reading it. I recommend it for anyone in the mood for a book that will take you on a journey. You get to inhabit a city in Italy and experience it through the eyes of another person in such a way that you will feel as if you have been there with her yourself.
Buy Whereabouts from Bookshop.org
Further reading: Olivia Laing feels like a good fit for this. Her book The Lonely City is subtitled 'adventures in the art of being alone'. Deborah Levy calls it 'a stunning homage to how extreme loneliness can make us more hospitable to the strangeness of others – to the risks and innovations of art and artists. Laing has written a classic that will be cherished for years to come'. Levy's own living autobiography series, Things I Don't Want To Know, The Cost of Living and most recently Real Estate also come to mind as Levy considers the life of a divorced woman in her 40s, 50s and turning 60. Laced through with feminism and literary reference points they are unmissable. And there's something of Lahiri's powerful quietness in Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, her famous novel about a woman exiled to a Swiss hotel by a lake after a romantic indescretion. Wandering the streets of the boring little town and interacting with the other hotel guests – all taking refuge from real life in some way or another – she considers whether or not to take charge of her own fate. Also, the only other thing I had read by Jhumpa Lahiri was a lovely essay called The Clothing of Books in which she explores the art of the book jacket, which I also recommend.
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