Whereabouts

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.