Whereabouts: A near-plotless story leaves an unforgettable aftertaste

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel is superbly written and deeply meditative

Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction is written in Italian and then translated by herself into English

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 ...