How do the lonely live?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s fifth novel, Whereabouts, has come after eight years. Her last fiction title Lowland was published in 2013. Pic/Getty Images

Long after this writer had begun voraciously reading John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer (and Chetan Bhagat), she came across Jhumpa Lahiri. This was in the summer of 2006. The book was Interpreter of Maladies, a second-hand copy of a collection of short stories, which we had picked up from a bookseller, snugged on the pavement facing Flora Fountain. We still remember devouring it on a rainy weekend, and not feeling quite like the same reader again. It was perhaps with this book that we got introduced to good literature. Lahiri became the doorway to exploring wonderful texts that awaited us.

As a diasporic writer, Lahiri has discussed themes of roots, family and home, once too many, in her works. Yet, it never felt repetitive, because her stories always travelled, where you least expected them to. After her last fiction, The Lowland (2013), Lahiri has probably made her readers wait the longest. Her new novel, Whereabouts (Penguin Random House), has come after eight years. Incidentally, this is the first novel that she has written in Italian and translated into English.

At the outset, we'd like to mention that this is not the Lahiri novel we are accustomed to reading. There's no Indian-American couple, torn between two lands, struggling to find meaning. It's not even about their children, haphazardly negotiating their vague desi identities. These recurring tropes, are forgotten - and for good reason - in Whereabouts, which is about an unnamed woman, living in a city, which at least seems to the reader to be somewhere in Italy, where she struggles with purpose.

Lahiri's narrator is a single woman, around 45, whose life seems jaded. This novella doesn't have a beginning, middle or end. Instead, it is her everyday story, as she walks on the sidewalk, works in her office, visits a bookstore, goes on vacation, or spends time by the sea. Each one, a new chapter. Lahiri's voice is terse and moves, as the narrator moves. It's an idea we love. But, that's where our attachment with the book ends.

Zooming the lens on the ordinariness of life of somebody without a partner, surrounded more or less by unhappy friends, an unmendable relationship with the mother and the wistful memories of lost loves, feels like a tale of unhappiness. There is something placid about the book. It's almost as if it is still, refusing to move, even after the narrator packs to leave, somewhere (or everywhere). There is a gloom we cannot explain, and it almost consumes us by the end of it, and we don't know why. Is it because the narrator is single? Is it because she is lonely? These two ideas converge at some point, and suddenly for us, it doesn't feel like a book that will make people traversing their life alone and on their own, very pleased.

Maybe that's what good writing can do. It's a novel you will finish reading in a few hours. But, the sadness in the book feels too insurmountable to overcome, days after you have put it down.

What: Whereabouts
For: Rs 399
Where: amazon.in