By the time they are in college (Udayan in Presidency College, Subhash in Jadavpur) the embers of the Naxalite movement have spread across West Bengal, and captured popular imagination. The two lead characters, inseparable during their childhood, grow up during the 1940s and 50s in Calcutta’s Tollygunge. Yet, it is Udayan who leaves, as he gets embroiled in the Naxalite movement, the armed peasant revolt in 1967 at Naxalbari in West Bengal, where farmers picked up arms against landlords. Udayan, moments later, uncharacteristically admits, “You’re the other side of me, Subhash. At the time, West Bengal is simmering with the effects of the Naxalbari uprising, and Subhash has just announced his decision to go abroad for further studies. “How can you walk away from what’s happening? There, of all places?” Udayan Mitra, one of the protagonists in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, asks his brother Subhash. But it also offers much of what Lahiri’s previous work does: simple but beautiful prose and a character worth getting to know.Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Lowland’ popularised the Naxalbari uprising for me, and even humanised the acts. Lahiri’s latest offers an unintended escape during a pandemic - seemingly mundane scenes at a cafe or country house serve as a taste of an Italian life at a time when it seems further away than ever, a reminder to appreciate the colour in our own daily lives. But by the end of the novel, Lahiri also hints at how those stories can change. Reflecting on herself as a teen, she thinks: “I didn’t like myself, and something told me I’d end up alone.” The interiority of the narrative drives home that the stories we tell ourselves are the most powerful in shaping our destinies. While there’s a sense of relief at being on her own at times, and at others admitting a partner would be nice, it’s unclear whether the character sees it as a choice, a circumstance or an inevitability. “Solitude: it’s become my trade … it’s a condition I try to perfect,” writes Lahiri. In talking about partnership and children, Lahiri writes a character who suspects her mother would be happier with grandchildren, but it’s not entirely clear whether she herself would be happier if she had children. While it’s clear the character is considered “local,” being a single, middle-aged woman marks her as an outsider, although her life is otherwise mostly conventional. Lahiri plays with the idea of insider and outsider in a less obvious way than her books that are more intentionally focused on immigrant narratives. At a lunch with a teenage daughter of friends who has moved out on her own, for instance, the character laments her own teen years: “I still regret my squandered youth, the absence of rebellion.” While readers meet her mother, the ghost of her father and friends, the encounters serve as a way to learn more about her. Lahiri herself has described her work in Italian as distinct from her work in English, becoming “more basic.” And yet “Whereabouts” retains some of the qualities much of her English work has: a subtle character full of wry observations, a narrative tinged with melancholy.įollowing a woman in her mid-40s, her latest work could be described as simply a series of vignettes, but the book can also be seen as an artful exposition of one woman’s solitude.Īs we follow the character, a professor, from the piazza to the bookstore to the bar, these vignettes deepen understanding of why she’s alone and her experience of it, which is neither wholly joyful nor tragic. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome to devote herself to mastering Italian, and now splits her time between Italy and the United States, where she is the director of Princeton’s creative writing program. Lahiri’s work in English needs little introduction - her short story collections (“Interpreter of Maladies,” “Unaccustomed Earth”) and novels (“The Namesake,” “The Lowland”) explore the difficulties immigrants and the generations that follow face in attempting to transition from outsider to insider. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author wrote the book in Italian - it was published in 2018 as “Dove mi Trovo.” She then translated it into English herself. Following a nameless character in an unknown Italian city without much of a plot might not seem like a formula for an engaging novel, but Jhumpa Lahiri’s expert prose transforms the banal into an absorbing read.Īnd there’s an interesting back story to it, too.
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