My goal is to make music out of the language

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

- MANDIRA NAYAR

It is early morning on a Thursday. The bookshelf is stuffed. There are thick envelopes with papers, Lunch Poems by Frank O’ Hara, pictures and books in Italian. They offer a peek into the world of Jhumpa Lahiri as she sits in her home in Princeton after returning from Italy. She has a new book out called Whereabouts. Originally written in Italian as Dove mi trovo, Whereabouts is Lahiri’s third novel and translated by her into English.

Unlike her other works, which come from a firmly rooted place and where the choice of names for characters is at the heart of the book—like in her debut novel—The Namesake, there are no specifics in Whereabouts. The characters remain unnamed, the Italian city where the story takes place is never identified, and the novel does not have an established ‘plot’ as such. Lahiri, instead, creates a very much in-herhead novel, exploring the concept of solitude through the musings of a middle-aged single woman over the course of a year.

The writing is spartan but, as always, evocative, eloquent, observant and tinged with wisdom. Written over three years, Dove mi trovo was published in 2018, in a pre-pandemic world. But in its exploration of solitude, it feels very much like a novel for these times. In an interview with THE WEEK, Lahiri talks about her childhood, about writing, and about never reading her own work. Excerpts:

Q/Is there a different Jhumpa Lahiri in English and in Italian? Did you find that you needed to access different versions of yourself to translate the book into English?