In an interview in 2017, one year before she published Dove mi trovo , her first novel in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri spoke about her metamorph...
In an interview in 2017, one year before she published Dove mi trovo, her first novel in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri spoke about her metamorphosis as a writer. “I used to look for an identity that could be sharp, acceptable, mine. But now the idea of a precise identity seems a trap.”
Five years earlier, Lahiri had surprised readers and friends alike by moving to Rome, led by an overriding desire to immerse herself in Italy, and more specifically, its language. In 2015, she published her first book in Italian, In altre parole, a work of non-fiction in which she asked herself, “why this escape, where do I have to get to, what am I trying to leave behind?”
Over a decade after becoming the literary default for the Indian-American experience in fiction – The Interpreter of Maladies, her Pulitzer-winning debut short story collection was published in 1999, followed by The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and Lowland, all of which explore lives of Indian immigrants in America – the answer to that question, at least partially, seems self-evident.
Fragments
In Whereabouts, her own translation of Dove mi trovo into English, Lahiri revels in an abjuration of the precise identity she had been chafing against. The novel is structured in the form of brief vignettes told by an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city in an unnamed country....
