It was as if at every chapter the curtains opened and I could get some insight into the mind and soul of this woman in a foreign city. Novel doesn't feel like the correct descriptor for this slim and delicate self-portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She's a brilliant thinker, and often captures some glittering moment of life in a way that's poetic and compelling (even in this novel the way she describes dishware, the thick ceramic juxtaposed with brittle stemware moved me). In a series of vignettes set over a year and spanning the seasons, Whereabouts chronicles the daily life of a middle aged single woman in an unnamed city, presumably Rome in Italy. As the impression the narrator leaves behind stays vague, the answer on that question seems ephemeral too.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian version of Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel in Italian “Dove mi trovo”. In "Dove mi trovo", her first novel written in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of a woman who turns her solitude into a profession.

I’ve created Instantly Italy to take you to Italy with me and explore together this crazy but “oh so lovely” country. The book is Dove mi trovo – which you can find in English as Whereabouts, translated by the author – and is not really a novel but more of a collection of thoughts and reflections. She describes herself as “ Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around.

Lahiri has always been adept at describing emotional depths with spare literary means: the simplest words, the least elaborate sentences.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. I thought of how, like the narrator, we crave anonymity and blend in with the crowd but yet we shrink from total solitude. Even if this is not said, you immediately have the feeling that the book refers to the authors’ solitary life in Rome.

The book is written in first person so we only read the narrator's point of view concerning her life. Since Papa published “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, a subgenre of literary fiction has swelled around Depressed Guys Wandering. Published by Guanda Editore, the book will be presented for the first time in London at the Italian Cultural Institute London Tuesday 6 November at 7pm, with author Sandro Veronesi. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications.Virtually every chapter title is a place--from a bar, post office, on a train she ponders her relationships with others. And like her protagonist narrator, Jhumpa Lahiri also reinvents herself by leaving her comfort zone to try something different. Perhaps there are some themes about isolation, the intermingling of solitude and self-fulfillment and connection, and navigating an urban landscape, through the writing dragged so I couldn’t feel much connection to the story either way. I'm about to leave but then I stop, I take off my jacket and start looking for a necklace to perk up my dress, it must be here somewhere, in some jewelry box (though I prefer 'joy box' for 'portagioie,' which, come to think of it , is the most beautiful of Italian words).

Different from her other books, one can see at various times, glimpses of old self, her previous works.She’s on the street, in a bar, a restaurant, a museum, her apartment, by the seaside…you get the gist. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement. An unnamed Italian middle-aged woman reflects on her life, friendships, and family relationships from different locations in an unnamed city but is Rome. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Never mind trying to achieve a personal tone of voice, as distinguishable as the one in my mother language.