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How do the lonely live?
Updated On: 02 May, 2021 10:06 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Jhumpa Lahiri’s fifth fiction title, the first novel to have been written in Italian, is a placid account of a single woman finding purpose in her world
Jhumpa Lahiri’s fifth novel, Whereabouts, has come after eight years. Her last fiction title Lowland was published in 2013. Pic/Getty Images
Long after this writer had begun voraciously reading John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer (and Chetan Bhagat), she came across Jhumpa Lahiri. This was in the summer of 2006. The book was Interpreter of Maladies, a second-hand copy of a collection of short stories, which we had picked up from a bookseller, snugged on the pavement facing Flora Fountain. We still remember devouring it on a rainy weekend, and not feeling quite like the same reader again. It was perhaps with this book that we got introduced to good literature. Lahiri became the doorway to exploring wonderful texts that awaited us.
As a diasporic writer, Lahiri has discussed themes of roots, family and home, once too many, in her works. Yet, it never felt repetitive, because her stories always travelled, where you least expected them to. After her last fiction, The Lowland (2013), Lahiri has probably made her readers wait the longest. Her new novel, Whereabouts (Penguin Random House), has come after eight years. Incidentally, this is the first novel that she has written in Italian and translated into English.
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