Dove mi trovo (Italian Edition)

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The character’s ability to take us into their world and show us what they are seeing was seamlessly and flawlessly executed. It was like getting this inclusive intel into this person’s life, while it is not super life changing it gets increasingly interesting.

From the few crumbs of details thrown at the reader, we guess that she is a professor at a university and has never been married or had children. Each tells about a person she knows or a place she has gone, often with recollections of her unhappy childhood. Although I bought this book more than a year ago, during my last trip to Italy, part of me wasn't ready to read it just yet. From the pages sounds the voice of a vulnerable, nameless woman living in a nameless Italian city (which is by several hints identifiable as Rome).Having read, and deeply empathised with, Lahiri's In Other Words—a nonfiction work in which she interrogates her love for and struggles with the Italian language—I was looking forward to Dove mi trovo. TEHRAN – American author Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel in Italian “Dove mi trovo” (“Where I Am”) has recently been published by Tehran-based publisher Ketab Tadaei. 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. The time is an unspecified present spanning the course of a year, complete with all the scenic props the change of seasons entails.

Il vocabolario e la sua poetica sono particolari, quasi insoliti; la struttura lessicale è inconsueta per un libro scritto in italiano (non tradotto) e molto stimolante. I don't know - this just feels underwhelming to me, a sort of generic version of contemporary 'literary women's writing' that never engaged or connected with me - instantly forgettable, in my case, I'm afraid. Nell’arco di un anno e nel susseguirsi delle stagioni, la donna arriverà a un «risveglio», in un giorno di mare e di sole pieno che le farà sentire con forza il calore della vita, del sangue. She wrote “Whereabouts” in Italian and then translated it into English, which contributes to its sheen of deliberateness and distance. This also reminded me of Deborah Levy but without the insight, the 'grab' factor or Levy's bursts of sardonic humour, with a bit of Katie Kitamura's intense navel-gazing in A Separation.E ora rimpiango di non aver assaggiato nulla di quel pasto abbondante di cui non mi hanno lasciato, gentilmente, nemmeno una briciola". While I can't say whether Lahiri always articulated phrases like an Italian would, I didn't notice any Englishism on her part.

Though I love Lahiri and highly recommend her short stories, I continue to struggle with her longer form narratives. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer. There are mentions of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, of a broken love affair, of potential ungrabbed and unachieved. She wrote her first work in Italian in 2015, a non-fiction piece entitled In altre parole which was translated into English as In Other Words by Ann Goldstein.

Dove mi trovo ( Where I Find Myself) is her second book in Italian and this time she has translated it herself into English as Whereabouts. The thoughts that come to roost in my head in those moments are always the gloomiest, also the most precise. The book is set out in a series of short chapters – set over a year, in which the unnamed narrator, living in the unnamed City (which seems to be Rome) in which she was born traces her life over the course of a year.