Dove mi trovo (Italian Edition)

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An unnamed narrator in an unnamed Italian city recounts a year in her life through a series of short, simple, quiet vignettes, each stamped by a "whereabout" in her life: In the Hotel; By the Sea; In My Head, At the Coffee Bar, etc. Whereabouts" is a slender novel composed of a series of vignettes about an unnamed, introverted, female narrator. Dove mi trovo was first published in softback in Italy, by the Milan-based publishing house Guanda [ it] on 30 August 2018. I loved that the author focused on a single middle-aged woman without children who is seemingly good at her job and has built a live and home she likes for herself.

She discovers that over time, this hypothetical affair, “which never took hold to begin with, loses its hold over me. I was mostly left with this agonizing question: Will we never get to read another Interpreter of Maladies or Unaccustomed Earth? Lahriri, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” is a careful explorer of subterranean emotional pain. La città in cui abita, e che la incanta, è lo sfondo vivo delle sue giornate, quasi un interlocutore privilegiato: i marciapiedi intorno a casa, i giardini, i ponti, le piazze, le strade, i negozi, i bar, la piscina che la accoglie e le stazioni che ogni tanto la portano più lontano, a trovare la madre, immersa in una solitudine senza rimedio dopo la morte precoce del padre.There are days I comb through the whole house hoping to find those things in some drawer I’ve already opened countless times, or maybe at the bottom of a box in my closet. The book was first published in 2018 before the pandemic, but the author was very skilled in writing about social isolation. And if the place I leave behind is linked to memories, grief, or happiness, that does not magnify my sadness.

If I had a mild disappointment with the book it is that I had hoped the process of writing in a third language (the author’s mother tongue was Bengali) and self-translating into English – would mean that the author would bring a new perspective to English – a new way of assembling the language to explore and express ideas – and I did not really sense that (in fact in some ways the opposite - a perhaps deliberate downplay of English). In each, in a first person present tense, the narrator – an academic who lives alone – describes both her own life and the lives of others and the City around her, and reflects on a number of relationships (her mother – with whom she had a tumultuous relationship as a child and teenager but who is now old and frail; her frugal father – who largely distanced himself from the mother-daughter rows, old lovers, and a married friend with whom the never acted on possibility of an affair serves as background music to their interactions).We see the church at the top of the hill, and an ancient olive tree decorated with shiny red balls, in place of a Christmas tree. I’m glad Lahiri translated the novel herself and I can’t actually decide if I preferred this English translation or its original Italian version. Lahiri has always been adept at describing emotional depths with spare literary means: the simplest words, the least elaborate sentences.