“In a sense, your book is exposed to more rigorous public reading.” Presenting a book in Italy, “there’s a more formal engagement with the text,” she said. “I was just convinced that the book couldn’t be in English, because I didn’t know where in me it had come from,” Lahiri said over video from Princeton, N.J., where she is the director of the university’s creative writing program. It is the first book Knopf will publish that was translated by its own author. Knopf next week will release her new novel, “ Whereabouts,” which Lahiri published in Italian in 2018 as “Dove Mi Trovo” and translated herself. Before the book’s 2016 release in English, Lahiri passed the translation to Ann Goldstein, who handled the English editions of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, fearful that translating her own work would contaminate her Italian.įive years later and living back in the United States, Lahiri has resolved those doubts.

She gave up English for years, reading and writing almost exclusively in Italian. That book traces her self-imposed linguistic exile: In 2012, she and her family moved to Rome so she could pursue a decades-long interest in the language. English was “a hairy, smelly teenager” menacing her nascent Italian, she wrote, which she cradled “like a newborn.” Jhumpa Lahiri opted for a more visceral description in “ In Other Words,” the first book she wrote in Italian. Some compare it to acting, others to performing in a chamber ensemble. This semblance of a breeze is what makes the painted nature tremble…” She’s also keenly self-aware: “Solitude: It’s become my trade… And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.Literary translators have come up with plenty of analogies for their trade.

She has a writer’s eye for detail, capturing a garden painted onto the walls of a museum: “The trees, with their thin branches, seem to bend as if from the soft breeze that courses through the landscape. Written in Italian and then translated by the author into English, “Whereabouts” features an anonymous first-person narrator who reveals tiny slices of her life in the course of 46 very short chapters with names like “At the Station” and “On My Couch” and “In My Head.” Readers will be challenged to piece together a plot, but we do learn that she’s a single professor somewhere in Italy, her father died when she was just a teen, and by the end she’s pondering a change of scenery from the place in which she is so thoroughly immersed throughout the book.īeyond that, there’s not much action in the story, which focuses instead on observations of everyday life, both in the various spaces the narrator inhabits and her inner monologue. Readers can debate in book clubs whether it’s a novel in the traditional sense, but it sure is novel in the original sense. Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri is back with what is sure to be one of the more unique “novels” of the year, “Whereabouts.”

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