Whereabouts
Lahiri wrote this in Italian (her adopted language) and translated it herself, making it a unique literary artifact about displacement, language, and the self you construct in a foreign tongue.
Strip away the premise and what’s left, to a cluster of readers, is a book that goes nowhere: one calls it “more like an exercise than a fully formed novel,” and a critic reaches for a whole subgenre to place it in, “the subgenre of literary fiction devoted to Depressed Guys Wandering.” Another reader found the narrator’s interior life thin rather than restrained, her observations landing “between the clichéd and the pedestrian.” A third sums up the mood in three words: the book simply “gave me the moody blues,” competent and forgettable within days of finishing.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
