Italian Introspection

This is a novella (just 157 pages) by Lahiri which she originally wrote in Italian, then translated herself, into English. It has over 45 chapters, so you can guess that each chapter is quite short. In expected Lahiri style, the writing is quite stylised, and so implies more than it says. I am not sure what difference having been written in Italian originally makes a Lahiri novel – it would have passed first through a different language consciousness one supposes, conceived of in Italian and not in English originally. However, to someone who has read a fair few Lahiri novels in the past, this one is recognisably hers too, slightly formal, slightly cryptic, always pointed, always revealing reservedly. 

The protagonist is not named, nor are the people she interacts with, nor the cities nor streets, in fact, nothing is pinned down, and the lack of naming suggests that this perhaps is intended to be possibly placed in just about any Italian city, tucked into the ordinary. The protagonist appears to be a middle-aged academic, who feels a lack of belonging everywhere, who feels her singleness and aloneness acutely, sometimes embracing it and sometimes saddened by it. She has a few friends, a difficult mother, a man she fancies but who is married to one of her friends, a few casual lovers. She does not seem to profess much interest in her work or her subject or her students. As the novel unfolds, the reader is given more and more a sense of how this woman is put together – her frugality from her childhood of her parents having to be very prudent with money, her being nagged by her mother’s unkind comments even though she has made herself entirely independent of her mother, her ability to find beauty and enjoyment in small things but also the ease with which small things can annoy, upset, distress, irritate her perhaps disproportionately, the sense of a person who has pulled themselves in on themselves, interacting with the world only on their own terms and only in suspicious, grudging degrees.  

The writing has the usual Lahiri clipped elegance and abstraction, but there are a few odd moments, which makes one wonder if the ‘flourish’ comes from being written in Italian originally. Such as when the protagonist is at the trattoria, she talks of the father and daughter who wait the tables, who are foreigners

They’re not from around here. Though they work all day on a noisy street, they come from an island. They store the sun’s blaze in their bones, barren hills dotted with sheep, the mistral that churns the sea.

p10

It is not quite clear what she means by people storing the sun’s blaze in their bones; plus, that sentence is odd, the subject is the father and daughter, ‘They’, but then the subjects change to hills and mistral – the syntax is all out of sync somehow. Another example,

The sun’s dull disk defeats me; the dense sky is the same one that will carry me away.

p131

Again, it is unclear how a sky can carry someone. Fortunately, there are not many such sentences to trip over. 

This appears to be one of those quite modern novels where you read about the inner life of a protagonist who feels out of place, who is not particularly remarkable, certainly hardly endearing as a personality, who does nothing extraordinary, but somehow the reader is expected to carry on building a relationship with this character, whose being and life is the centre and entire storyline of the book. There are quite a few such and this is perhaps one which does it as well as any, but it is not a genre that appeals in particular to me. There is a trend to celebrate the ordinary and mundane. But this is the kind of writing which goes nowhere. It is supposed to be introspective, the little outward activities and actions carrying a wealth of meaning, or alternatively, no meaning whatsoever. Lahiri’s writing style pulls this off reasonably successfully, making it as usual something I am not at all sorry to have read, but which does not leave me resolving to reread.  

For once in a way, the book cover represents the experience conveyed by the book extremely accurately – seen from the back without her face visible, an anonymous woman, yet of certain characteristics, standing before 2 doors, one opened one closed, in shades of quiet, dull blues and whites, light and shadow, the very sparsely furnished room echoing the sparsely furnished life perhaps. Whereabouts is not without a certain sparse beauty, particularly in the selection of images and actions detailed, the careful and minimalistic recounting of this one life, the selection and construction of information and word arrangements; and yet, it is a dispiriting read somehow, it does not buoy the spirits, it leaves you feeling like you have gone nowhere, gotten nowhere, seen a lot and yet learnt not much – and perhaps this is the best testimony to the continued power of Lahiri’s prose; that she can affect you, get into your mind, leave a lingering atmosphere in her wake.