PAST THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

Jhumpa Lahiri’s English translation of her first Italian novel is unlike the earlier books she has written

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WHEREABOUTS by Jhumpa Lahiri PENGUIN HAMISH HAMILTON ₹499; 176 pages

Jhumpa Lahiri, in the introduction to Ties, her award-winning translation of Domenico Starnone’s ironic, wry yet emotionally fraught novel Lacci, notes a particular passage that “stopped me in my tracks”. A passage that “lays bare the flawed human impulse to endure.... The disquieting message of Ties is not so much that life is fleeting, that we are alone in this world, that we hurt one another, that we grow old and forget, but that none of this can be captured, not even by means of literature”. Not that such knowledge stops writers from trying to express the inexpressible on the page, from trying to give form to the unruly spill of our lives.

“Contained” is a word often used to describe Lahiri’s style, her characters trapped in a doomed effort to exert emotional control, to keep wildness at bay. In Italian—the language in which she has written her last three books, including her 2018 debut novel Dove Mi Trovo, which she has translated herself as Whereabouts, available in bookshops later this month, or at least whenever it’s safe for us to return to bookshops—she is even more contained, spare, her self-admittedly limited range (in comparison to her English) perhaps necessarily making her gnomic, aphoristic.