About Whereabouts

Reading Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri at this time feels so appropriate.

March is Women's History Month. Here is a novel by an incredible woman author about a woman in her mid-forties!

How many times have you came across a novel/fiction where the protagonist is a middle-aged woman leading a mundane life?

We are the forgotten lot. It is always about someone else, the kids, the society, the triumphant heroes, the troublemakers, the revolutionaries, the iconoclasts and so on, but never us.

Right there I love this book.

I also love the irony, sarcasm & cynicism that does not come from a place of bitterness. I find them quite appealing when they come from a place of owning what you feel, from refusing to get 'caught in the charade'.

Many times, I chuckled while reading. For instance, when she talks about how 'in spring, she suffers', how 'the light disorients & the fulminating nature overwhelms' her & how she 'dislikes feeling pushed inevitably forward'.

Or when she describes the hotel lobby as a 'parking garage designed for human beings'.

When she is worried about 'forgetting something crucial', as she is "about to have a perfectly forgettable day'. 

How at dawn she is 'both ablaze with energy and sapped of it'

How the people around whom her mom 'never sulked were all the people she didn't live with'.

How 'solitude demands a precise assessment of time...you need to know how much time you need to kill'.

The novel beautifully portrays the comfort of being among 'familiar strangers' in an urban cocoon. In these interactions, there is a connection but there is no obligation. 

Contrary to many reviewers, I don't think this book portrays loneliness. I don't find her solitude sad or pitiable. It seems just as perfect or just as pathetic as anyone's married life with a family & kids. It is simply another way of life, 'a road not taken' for many.

Years ago, I had watched the movie 'Pather Panchali' made by the renowned Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, based on a novel written by another Bengali author (Jhumpa Lahiri is also a Bengali). I never felt the sadness or pity that many did. To me it was a slice of life. I have personally & fairly intimately known people that lived those lives, especially the old granny. A few of my dad's siblings had succumbed to mysterious illnesses at young ages. Over generations we have moved, migrated to seek better opportunities. I don't find anything particularly sad or pitiable about those stories.

Sometimes when I share snippets of our childhood, our kids conclude that we were 'poor'!

We actually never felt poor, I still don't think we were. We are physically intact, we got educated, we were surrounded by people who cared a lot about one another, we experienced everything - feeling happy & sad, hopeful & disheartened, triumphant & defeated, love & loathing, pain & passion - the whole gamut. Nothing was lacking.

[side note - I think I need to reframe my kids' definition of 'poor']

   

Anyways, now back to whereabouts, I find the story strangely liberating & oddly empowering. 

You feel the freedom to think your thoughts, feel your feelings, do anything you want or don't. 

Your life could be as mundane as it gets - a 'banal stubborn residue of life'. 

You could be 'disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around'...

but you are still its "main character".

_______________

P.S: This was the first book I reached for in the pile of books the Irish Arts Center had for distribution on #IACBookDay. I had already been fascinated by the story about this story. I am still astounded by how the author managed to pick up a new language in her adulthood, gain so much fluency and write a beautiful full-length novel in that language. This is an English translation of the original Italian novel (translated by the author herself).