As I put down Jhumpa Lahiri's 

Whereabouts  (Penguin India, 2021), I felt

like I had been transported back to a school library, where more than a
decade ago I sat staring at the back cover of Interpreter of
Maladies (1999). I had no reference of the timely significance of the book
or its author, no notion of what South Asian diaspora voices meant or
why their visibility was important. I had simply been drawn to a section
that I noticed no one would ever pick up a book from. The short stories
were my introduction to South Asian immigrant and diaspora literature,
and Lahiri's quiet and poignant insights, filtered through graceful prose,
showed me a new world of storytelling. The impression this left stayed
with me, as a reminder that the art of storytelling is diverse—there is no
singular, correct way to write a good book. 

Now, decades later, as I stare at the back cover of Whereabouts, I

question myself as to whether I had forgotten this. I think I went in with
loaded expectations of what a good novel, especially coming from Lahiri,
would look like. And so when I stepped into Whereabouts, I lost my
balance for a bit. 

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Whereabouts is Jhumpa Lahiri's third novel, published originally as  Dove

mi trovo  (2018) in Italian and translated to English by the author herself,
as she did with her work of nonfiction, In Other Words  (2015). The book
is an indication of her skill in navigating between languages without
compromising the depth of her storytelling. In nearly all her previous
work, such as The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland  (2013),  or the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Maladies  (1999), Lahiri took the reader into the
cracks and faultlines of immigrant experiences brought to life with vivid
settings and compelling characters; she left us there to absorb the
conflicts and sense of loss, even if one has never been in an unhappy
marriage, or been an immigrant. The heartache she wrote about was
universal. 

In Whereabouts, this universality is reflected in Lahiri's handling of space

—fluid and ever-changing, a palimpsest of experiences, and instrumental
to the story.  While we are taken through her day to day experiences "At
the Supermarket", "In the Country", "In My Head", and "At His Place",
among other spaces, we notice that the character seems consistently at
an emotional distance from her surroundings. This is reiterated with the
recurring chapter heading of "In My Head", a space where the unnamed
narrator most often dwells. It is at this site where the truths of her mind
and body play out, rather than unfolding in her reality. 

In the instances where the narrator does interact with others—a friend's
young daughter, a woman sleeping beside her on the beach—there
seems to be a visible contrast in how they are often more secure in the
spaces they inhabit than the narrator herself. At times, the text seems
like a dialogue between all these women in different stages of life.