Coz The Little Moments Of Women’s Lives Are Universal, Whereabouts We May Be

The protagonist of Whereabouts could be the everywoman. It is a book of observation and introspection, of the ordinary that makes life such a universal experience. 

I’m caught in the charade, I play a part in it, albeit as an extra.’

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri is a translated novel of her original Italian, Dove mi Trovo (“Where I Am” or “Where I Find Myself”) with the entire translation done by the author herself. And it shows. If I had not known there was an original version of this text, I would have readily believed the English prose to be the original, because it reads without a glitch.

The protagonist often finds comfort in the little moments of affection she derives from momentary conversations with a friend’s husband, with fleeting lovers, with a dog she’s watching over for the friends. Still, there are moments where she’s at a dinner party, at a wedding, at a baptism, and she feels at odds with the setting – alone in a crowd of known faces.

So what does our protagonist say?

Though not likeable in the cookie cutter sense as a protagonist, I found the narrator relatable in many ways. Such as, while discussing the fears which inhabit her mind out of the blue –

‘If anything, I’m about to have a perfectly forgettable day: a class to teach, a meeting with colleagues, maybe a movie. But I’m afraid of forgetting something crucial – my cell phone or my identity card, my health insurance or my keys. And I’m afraid of running into trouble.’

When she and another woman realized they had been sharing a boyfriend for five years – ‘We realized we were two survivors, and in the end we felt like partners in a crime. Each revelation was devastating. Everything she said. And yet, even as my life shattered in pieces, I felt as if I were finally coming up for air.’

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Growing up in a family priding in frugality, the narrator as a young girl was often reminded how wasteful some expenses could be. Those teachings follow her around even now – ‘If I walk into a store, if I admire something but don’t buy it, if I walk out and manage to avoid the cash register, I feel like a virtuous daughter.’ But, of course, sometimes – ‘And if I cave, well, I cave.’

All in all, Whereabouts is a book of observation and introspection, separate and influenced by one another. It is about the ordinary things in life, the regular things in life, and its lack of plot – and names – makes me wonder if this book could have existed in English if it had not first been written in Italian.

I’ll leave the review with this quote from The Office: “There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?”

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Image source: a still from Filter Copy Middle Class Things and book cover Amazon

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