Reading more like a series of encounters-vignette-windows through which we observe snapshots of a life-than what we traditionally consider a novel, the book is a formal embodiment of the person it introduces us to. She is indeed something of an afterthought, both to herself and the reader, as we come to learn during our brief, 176-page journey with her. This intimate self-awareness is such a heightened presence in Whereabouts that it might be considered the book’s protagonist, separate from the middle-aged woman embodying that consciousness who moves about an unnamed European town over the course of a year in the novel’s pages. These are the words of the “great writer” Corrado Alvaro, recalled by the narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fourth novel, Whereabouts, in a chapter titled “At Dawn.” Observing the cyclical, predictable rise of the sun on a winter morning from her rooftop, she watches “until it’s no longer possible, until it becomes too painful.” Then her mind wanders to the above fragment of language wherein another thinker, like her, is pained by the questions of worth and visibility that the sun provokes each morning. After a while, terrified, I flee from the shadow of the enormous flaming orb: I fear it will consume me I can’t concentrate, everything seems futile, life itself seems banal, it no longer matters if no one pays any attention to me, if no one ever writes to me again.
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