Whereabouts Book Review

by Vidya Hariharan

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel Whereabouts (2018) explores a haunting sense of ‘homelessness.’ It was originally written by Lahiri in Italian and later translated by her own hand into English. Lahiri is a Bengali writer raised in the U.S.A. by Bengali immigrant parents, and in 2012 she relocated to Italy. Neither English nor Italian are her primary languages or mother tongue. However, she is at home in both languages.

In this novel, homelessness is understood as a feeling of not belonging to a place or a geographic location. In the modern world one feels ‘not-at-home’ or rootless anywhere in any place. We may lay claim to several homes but not be ‘at Home’ in any of them. Whereabouts says on its blurb: ‘Over the arc of one year, in the middle of her life’s journey, she realizes that she’s lost her way’. The unnamed female narrator existing in an unnamed city and wandering through unnamed streets and marketplaces emits a strong sense of homelessness. The chapter titles are accessible to us only through her presence—the first chapter is called ‘On the Sidewalk’ and it describes the plaque of an unknown man whom she conjectures died in a hit-and-run accident. The next chapter is titled ‘On the Street’ and it describes an encounter with a male friend with whom the narrator may or may not have had an affair and who accompanies her to a lingerie shop to purchase a pair of tights for her. The sixteenth chapter is titled ‘In the Hotel’, and the twentieth ‘In August’. There are no other markers of place or time other than these arbitrary ones, which endows a particular timelessness and placelessness to the events which she describes, so that the spaces she describes could be any city or town. A seasonal model of time is used instead, with spring and winter being the markers indicating the passage of time. Chapter Five is titled ‘In Spring’ and begins with the line, “In spring I suffer”. Chapter twenty-six mentions, “It’s a wintry Sunday.”

It is significant that the narrator’s mapping of the unknown city is done while walking. “In the morning after breakfast I walk past a small marble plaque…”; “One rainy afternoon I walk down a long street lined with shops.” “We walk to the top of the road but alas the bar is closed”. The flaneur was usually portrayed as a gentlemen of leisure, Lahiri inverts the trope by making her narrator/flaneur a woman, who suffers from a sense of mysterious loss. The flanuer is a silent keen observer of place and people and is usually an artist or poet. Lahiri’s protagonist is a working woman, an intellectual. Though this is not mentioned clearly there are statements which give the reader a clue. In the chapter titled ‘In the Office’ she says,

“I feel exposed, surrounded by colleagues and students who walk down the hallways... I read and correct student papers… the student sits in front of me, confident, full of ambition.”

The narrator observes and describes the people, places and natural phenomena around her with great acuity. She describes a room in her favorite museum thus:

“The museum features a number of houses from antiquity... the most beautiful room—it belonged to the emperor’s consort—has a garden painted onto the walls, teeming with trees, flowers, citrus plants and animals.”

Her ‘beloved stationary store’ is described as well:

“Even when I don’t need anything in particular I stop in front of the windows to admire the display, which always appears so festive, decked with backpacks, scissors, tacks, glue, Scotch tape, and piles of little notebooks, with and without lines on the pages… the father oversees the fountain pens stored in a glass case, as if they were precious jewels, bottles of ink lined up like costly perfumes.”

These are places she visits often. Though she is surrounded by the familiar, she feels ‘peripheral’. In the midst of the familiar landscape, she feels ‘bewildered’. She asks herself, “What bewilders me, even here at home?” Very often she feels ill at home, a series of small, non-specific ailments—“A series of mysterious pains, odd afflictions that would arise out of the blue and then go away…” She feels her heart rate increasing when she is at her most relaxed, sitting in her favorite armchair, reading. This vague discomfort in her home and body is symptomatic of a wider malaise felt by society. The angst she senses in herself is a part of not being ‘at home’ anywhere in the world. In the novel, there are several other characters who share this feeling of anxiety and express it in stubborn unacceptable behavior. The narrator observes and describes the behavior of three children: the first, the daughter of happily married parents who get divorced after the husband is found to have had an affair. The child refuses to spend time with her father, and when she does, she is uncommunicative. The second, a young girl who describes her misery in her powerful drawings as she is unhappy with her mother’s constant travels and her long absences from home. The third, a little girl who visits the narrator in her home with her parents and quietly draws a thin line on the narrator’s white sofa. This last act of nihilism is the quite disturbing and the narrator refuses to sit on that sofa again. The parents, her friends, know about it and do not apologise for their daughter’s behavior.

The narrator also describes adult angst. In the chapter ‘At the Museum’, she observes a middle-aged elegant female tourist who is oblivious of the beautiful paintings on the walls, and instead, is preoccupied with her swollen feet. “[She] thinks about all the streets she’s walked in the past few days, in a vast city, alone, disorientated all the while”. What shocks the narrator is the stranger’s next act: she lies down on the benches placed in front of the paintings and goes to sleep.  The generally understood purpose of such a space is to admire the artwork and not use it as a bedroom. This atypical use of the space shocks and unsettles the narrator.

The narrator’s past visits to her therapist and the obligatory revelations about her unhappy childhood and ambivalent feelings for her mother are revealed to the reader in a no-nonsense manner. She describes the therapist’s office: “The room was so small that it felt like a beautifully furnished closet… a sanatorium that hosted one anguished soul at a time”. She lay down on the couch, with the therapist sitting in an armchair behind her. She compares her sessions to chapters of an abandoned novel. The revelations made to the therapist are disjointed—her dreams, nightmares, her mother’s rages and her father’s sudden death when she was fifteen years old. And abruptly, one day, she stops visiting the therapist. Just like the narrator’s memories, the chapters in the novel are not arranged in any progressive order.

The last chapter is called ‘On the Train’ and shows the narrator moving to another city for a year. In ‘Nowhere’ she begins by saying,

“Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter; the space , the walls, the light… Is there any place we are not moving through? Disoriented, lost at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around.”

The cities she occupies are interchangeable because she lacks ties to any place; she is a modern nomad. Lahiri’s narrator  is a single woman in her mid-forties, living alone in a rented space, has a male lover whom she meets sporadically, without children or other dependents and a job which she is dispassionate about. The traditional role that the State and society expect her to fulfil as a wife and mother are those she eschews in favor of being single and unattached. The last chapter ‘In The Train’ does seem to indicate that she will be a perpetual nomad,  a transient in every city.

The dialectic of inside/outside is constantly at play in the novel. Where the narrator is expected to feel most a home are those spaces where she feels dread—her home, her office, with friends, that is, private spaces. The spaces where she feels less constricted and repressed are the public spaces, like the pool, the piazza and walking or driving down the streets of the city. Very often when she is inside a room she is looking out of the window at the open sky. She visits the city’s public swimming pool often. About being in the public pool and surrounded by water she says, “Everything—my body, my heart, the universe—seems tolerable when I’m protected by water and nothing touches me”. The pool is usually occupied by people she meets regularly there, but the stories she hears in the locker room fill her with dread and the water in the pool feels contaminated. The stories are of other people’s pain—surgery scars, guilt about failed relationships, financial misfortune and death. These discussions that she overhears in the locker room make her feel heavy and burdened. It makes her seek out open spaces. The narrator has earmarked certain spaces in her city which she considers her familiar and favorite haunts—the stationery store, the museum, the theatre, the pool, the supermarket, the salon and the piazza. However, the stationery shop is taken over by a generic luggage brand, the pool is contaminated by the private revelations in the locker room, the spa worker mocks the narrator’s unmarried state, and so on. The lobby in the hotel where she is invited to participate in a conference is vast and cavernous, filled with people but the people crowding around are like miniatures as they are dwarfed by the sheer size of the atrium. The narrator feels “compelled to turn around and leave.” At the same time, the reason for which she chose to speak to a particular therapist was the beauty and cosiness of the elevator in the therapist’s building.

In this mass of contradictions in the city resembles Kevin Lynch’s ‘alienated city’ which is impossible to map. The affection for the city which suddenly overwhelms her one day occurs when she is about to leave for another nameless city. It is also the day she unexpectedly comes across her double or her ‘doppelganger’. She feels compelled to follow this mysterious woman who looks like her. “I ignore the things I need to do and start following her. I have no choice in the matter.” On the way, unaware of her own path, she tries to guess her twin’s past, background, her state of mind, her family and destination. She feels her melancholy lifting and she realizes that, “I’m me and also someone else. I’m leaving and also staying.” Just as suddenly as she saw this woman, she disappears. The narrator wonders whether she imagined her. The narrator feels distracted but certain of having seen her double. She compares her to a clean page of a newspaper which the narrator had mislaid but managed to find again. She describes her as a “variation of myself, with as sprightly step, determined to get somewhere. Just up ahead.”

Just before she came across her ‘double’, the narrator had visited her mother to inform her of her move to another city across the border and to say goodbye. The meeting was not a happy one, nor was it as traumatic as the narrator had assumed it would be. She comes away with the realization that her mother was old and involved with her various age-related ailments, that she no longer had the power to harm her with her words. Her mother was not interested in her daughter’s life at all. Instead of bothering her, this awareness sets her free.

In the end, the narrator muses, “ I’ve never stayed still, I’ve always been moving… confused, uprooted, turned around. These words are my abode, my only foothold.” As we have seen in this novel, the narrator does not carry any positive childhood memories at all. She admits that her memories of growing up at home are painful ones. She has no toys or other mementoes of her happy infancy. Since she remains nameless throughout the novel we cannot make any guesses as to her place of origin. All of the characters populating the novel remain nameless and the city, its streets, landmarks, all remain a mystery.