Written first in Italian as "Dove Mi Trovo" - "where I find myself" - then translated by the author.
The novel comprises journal entries, more or less, of a 46 y.o. working in Italy at a university. Her mother is alive, with a busy social life. Her father died when she was 15. Both women feel alone. I think she grew up in the same city. She's gradually ferrying her books from home to her office.
She likes the husband of a friend. She helps an independent young girl who she's been aware of for years. She meets her ex in a bookshop. She'd been with him 5 years, breaking up when she met a women who was also his lover. They'd compared notes. She had therapy for a year (her mother was unkind to her). She acts as a therapist for a successful, busy mother who fears that her daughter misses her. She swims twice a week (overhearing the sad changing-room chat), bonds with a beautiful manicurist, books theatre tickets well in advance. She wonders how well one can interpret a person (her parents, her first boyfriend) by their attitude to money. Finding a decapitated mouse on the path upsets her.
She goes on breaks - "The only problem is that here, too, I feel pressure to do what everyone else does". She has male company - "Never married, but like all women, I've had my share of married men", "Today one of my lovers keeps calling".
Rarely do chapters allude to earlier ones - in a paper she sees that a prof she talked to at a conference dies. Her infatuation with the husband of a friend cools when she dog-sits for them.
She buys a suitcase in the shop that used to be her favourite stationers - she's got a fellowship for a year, abroad. Before she goes, she visits her mother. After, she writes "My mother, by now, clings to life like a yellowing piece of Scotch tape in a scrapbook. It can detach at any moment, and yet it still does the job. All you need to do is turn the page to unstick it, so that it leaves a pale rectanglar stain behind". She's not impressed by what she's just written, it feels overwrought. She visits her father's grave. She cleans her flat so that there's no trace of her. In the train to her new job a family get in and noisily eat, speaking a language she doesn't recognise. One cuts the hair of another. Then they leave.
Other reviews
- Tanjil Rashid (Whereabouts is a novel in vignettes, each chapter a postcard from an everyday landmark – “In the Bookstore”, “At the Beautician”, etc – typically experienced alone, although sometimes highlighting the consolation of strangers. ... Where her English thrived on the particular, Lahiri’s Italian reaches for the universal. Astonishingly, Whereabouts contains not a single proper noun: nothing to identify individuals or places.)
- Madeleine Thien (This is a difficult novel because the pain of the narrator’s isolation feels extremely real. The book sheds dramatic structure, connective tissue and other characters, as if they were all part of a lifelong cage. In the brief, almost airy entries, where sentences are honed to minimalist beauty, the overriding sensation is of a shrinking world)
- Sharon Steel (Whereabouts is a book about metamorphosis, loneliness, the burden of being a child, the savagery of nature, the joys of community, food, and friends. ... The woman’s search for identity and equilibrium amid the flux makes her a classic Lahiri character. What sets her apart is that, unlike the strivers and seekers of Lahiri’s previous books, this woman takes a perverse comfort in the air of melancholy that settles over her life)
