Review by Club Member - Medha Hisaria

Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri, was the first book for the read-along hosted by Read a Kitaab. The readers of the community resonated well with both the character and the book. The novel is in the form of snippets narrated by an unnamed person. Lahiri avoids names and specifics altogether in the book, be it places, characters or nationalities. The lack of identity to the protagonist’s name and location binds all the readers together, giving them agency.

Whereabouts is a novel of fragments, each of its short chapters offering a brief window into the narrator’s personality and life. “Solitude: it’s become my trade,” she observes. “As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, and it weighs on me despite me knowing it so well.” This tension between the pleasures of solitude and the sadness of loneliness, between her dissatisfaction and flashes of joy, is the erect spine that holds up the novel.

The readers of Read a Kitaab celebrated the interplay between solitude and melancholy and Lahiri’s magnificent writing style. However, they believed that a few emotions were lost in translation.