Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri – #ABookADayInMay – Day 9

I absolutely loved the short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and naturally was keen to try more by her. It’s taken a while, but today I read Whereabouts – first published in Italian in 2018, and translated by the author in 2021. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel translated by its author before, and it all adds to Lahiri’s exceptional talent. This novel – as so often in May, I am tempted to add ‘novella?’ as a qualifier – is about an unnamed woman in her mid-40s walking through a city. That is almost the whole plot. The story describes many different days, rather than one, but it is like an eternal moment – whether passing a shop that used to house her favourite stationery store, visiting her grieving mother, or struggling to leave the hosue, we are in a sort of everyday always. There is a sense that her life is unchanging, but she is not trapped, exactly. She is too caught up in observing everything and everyone. It’s one of several ways the book…