27 Sep / Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri [in Booklist]
Pulitzer Prize-winning polyglot Jhumpa Lahiri’s second title in Italian arrives in her own translation, narrated by Italian American Susan Vinciotti Bonito. Despite Bonito’s fluency in their shared language, her noticeably youthful timbre isn’t initially convincing as Lahiri’s unnamed, 40-something protagonist. And yet Lahiri’s unadorned, sharply focused prose ensures aural gratification.
Alone, untethered, the woman is a writer and teacher in an anonymous city with a widowed mother, ex-lovers, few friends, and only occasional colleagues. Intimacy seems to belong in her books, as well as memories, regular haunts, and journeys – titular “whereabouts.” She’s undeniably in need of change – she presents at a literary conference, goes to a friend’s empty country home, and creates strangers’ lives as if her own is not enough.
Bonito reads crisply, with a heightened awareness acknowledging that Lahiri has chosen every word with absolute intention. The seemingly small, everyday events that define the woman’s life feel like small gifts of crystallized insight, but slowly morph into reasons for possible dread, inching toward suffocation. By book’s end, Lahiri will brilliantly, sadly, truncate “whereabouts” to “out”: “Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around.”
Review: “Audio,” Booklist, September 1, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2018 (Italy), 2021 (United States)