Whereabouts: A near-plotless story leaves an unforgettable aftertaste
Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel is superbly written and deeply meditative
FICTION
Whereabouts
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Bloomsbury, €18.20
I rarely watch Waiting for Godot without envisaging it being set amid the Wicklow Mountains that Samuel Beckett loved to traverse as a boy. This, of course, is an illusion. The magic of Beckett’s play is that, by being set nowhere, it could be set anywhere. Its absence of local colour is heightened by the fact that he deliberately first wrote it in French, which wasn’t his native ...