Hardcover, 160 pages
English language
Published by Knopf.
A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies—her first in nearly a decade.
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in …
A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies—her first in nearly a decade.
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change.
This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
Dear stars, when has Jhumpa Lahiri, who had massive impact on me with "The Namesake", become a bland inconsequential Italian lady? And even more, how did this book get so many rave reviews?
Not really a novel. Nor related short stories. The gathered snippets are short scenes. All from the same narrator, but almost unrelated. The book gives a poetic sense of place and a melancholy feeling, but not much of a narrative.
Pleasant meditations on urban isolation, but Lahiri comes across as oddly conservative in some really off-putting ways (fat-shaming, heteronormativity, etc).
Written originally in Italian and then translated into English by the author herself, this is an interesting experiment. The nameless narrator belongs and does not belong to the nameless Italian city in which she lives and which also lives around her.
