Dove mi trovo (Italian Edition)

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I loved that the author focused on a single middle-aged woman without children who is seemingly good at her job and has built a live and home she likes for herself. Nelle ultime parole di questa sorta di romanzo a episodi, l'autrice tenta di spiegare come la vita con le sue piccole e insignificanti vicende vada assaporata briciola dopo briciola. A voice that discloses more fragility that the woman is willing to acknowledge, a voice that speaks of solitude and loneliness – a loneliness that is particularly candid and often aching when the middle-aged narrator is with and among others, her friends, her mother, an ex-lover, at a party or in a bar. I loved the melancholy that pervaded most of the book and the reflections on solitude and on living alone in a foreign city.

The novel takes place during a single year, and our narrator will often remark on the current season. She enjoys walking in her neighborhood and associating with others for a short time, but then needs to go back to her routine, quiet life.The novel itself is a series of vignettes, observations, written by a woman in her late 40s living in a city (presumably in Italy). In "Dove mi trovo", her first novel written in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of a woman who turns her solitude into a profession.

Since Papa published “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, a subgenre of literary fiction has swelled around Depressed Guys Wandering. In a series of vignettes set over a year and spanning the seasons, Whereabouts chronicles the daily life of a middle aged single woman in an unnamed city, presumably Rome in Italy. Such made me want to give the narrator as well as Jhumpa Lahiri (who both would probably disagree) a big hug, as this book feels so personal I cannot imagine not sensing traces of her own experiences and emotions in it. There are so many layers and textures with Lahiri's poetic prose as she explores family and community, goals and dreams.And the fifth shining star was given because Lahiri moved to Italy quite a few years ago embracing the country, the culture and the language.

At the same time, as I read this I kept wishing I wrote about my own life this way, at least just for myself. Photo: Front cover of the Persian version of Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel in Italian “Dove mi trovo”. She observes her surroundings and doesn’t do much else; she seems to struggle with depression or a depression-adjacent worldview and perspective. If she'd explored that more, rather than wandering the city and using each short chapter to muse about some random topic, I would've felt more invested in her story. Although not capturing Rome but the Italian city of Matera, Federico Scarchilli’s gorgeous picture on the cover of the Dutch edition harmonises wonderfully with the novel.In each, in a first person present tense, the narrator – an academic who lives alone – describes both her own life and the lives of others and the City around her, and reflects on a number of relationships (her mother – with whom she had a tumultuous relationship as a child and teenager but who is now old and frail; her frugal father – who largely distanced himself from the mother-daughter rows, old lovers, and a married friend with whom the never acted on possibility of an affair serves as background music to their interactions). While Lahiri's 'Italian voice' differs from the one in her English works, Dove mi trovo is the kind of quietly reflective and deeply nostalgic novel that I would happily revisit time and again. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer.

She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998). The best way I can describe this book is that it reminded me of those writing exercises you do in foreign language classes, where they ask you to keep a diary and describe something you've seen or done during a particular day.I did not quite have the same intense and intimate experience with her Italian books as I did with her immigrant writing. Jhumpa Lahiri’s early novels and short stories explored the theme of displacement and alienation in the context of the Indian- American immigrant experience.