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Title details for Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri - Available

Whereabouts

A Novel

by Jhumpa Lahiri
Susan Vinciotti Bonito
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies—her first in nearly a decade—about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties.

Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.
 
This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 27, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593393277
      • File size: 97830 KB
      • Duration: 03:23:48

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 18, 2021
      The latest from Pulitzer winner Lahiri (The Interpreter of Maladies) is a meditative and aching snapshot of a life in suspension. The unnamed narrator, a single, middle-aged woman, lives a quiet life in an unnamed Italian city, ambling between cafes and storefronts, dinner parties with friends, and a leisurely career as a writer and teacher. The tranquil surface of her life belies a deeper unrest: a frayed, distant relationship with her widowed mother, romantic longings projected onto unavailable friends, and constant second-guessing of the paths her life has taken. The novel is told in short vignettes introducing a new scene and characters whose relationships are fertile ground for Lahiri’s impressive powers of observation. In a museum, for instance, sunlight refracted through the glass roof “brightens and darkens the room in turns. It’s a panorama that makes me think of the sea, of swimming in a clear blue patch underwater.” Throughout, 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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Susan Vinciotti Bonito gives this introspective, fragmented fiction--written in Italian and translated into English by the author--a delicate, poignant narration. She narrates the vignettes with a deliberate pace and inquiring tone that suit the internal monologue style. The choice to read in a distinctly inflected way gives the novel an immersive quality that illuminates the inner workings of the unnamed narrator's mind. The world that Lahiri creates feels Italian: Women are signoras, she eats in trattorias, says ciao. The narrator, presumably a literature professor in her mid-forties, closely observes her world and herself and has a rich imagination. The novel's slim chapters often have prepositional phrase titles--"On the Street," "At the Trattoria," In the Pool"--that taken together combine to create listeners' understanding of a solitary and lonely life. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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