Dove mi trovo (Italian Edition)

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Sgomento ed esuberanza, radicamento ed estraneità: i temi di Jhumpa Lahiri in questo libro raggiungono un vertice. She moves in and out of these different urban spaces forming tacit and fleeting connections with the people she encounters.

Subscribe to the Vespa rides and get full access to Your Italian Toolbox, a library of language learning materials that you can use to practice Italian. Yet, I cannot think of a more elegant and stirring representation of this past year and a half of isolation and sadness and anxiety than this lovely book. I understand her relationship to Italian as I share her passion for living and breathing a foreign language. I loved that the author focused on a single middle-aged woman without children who is seemingly good at her job and has built a live and home she likes for herself. I think what I love about this book is that there is an undercurrent of loneliness but never in a depressing way.She wrote her first work in Italian in 2015, a non-fiction piece entitled In altre parole which was translated into English as In Other Words by Ann Goldstein. NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies--her first in nearly a decade--about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. In each, in a first person present tense, the narrator – an academic who lives alone – describes both her own life and the lives of others and the City around her, and reflects on a number of relationships (her mother – with whom she had a tumultuous relationship as a child and teenager but who is now old and frail; her frugal father – who largely distanced himself from the mother-daughter rows, old lovers, and a married friend with whom the never acted on possibility of an affair serves as background music to their interactions). Una solitudine totale che sinceramente soffoca alla fine il lettore, la protagonista sembra volutamente creata senza la possibilità di chiedersi e donarsi il perchè delle cose e senza forza e desiderio "vero"di cambiamento.

She ruminates on her childhood, the troubled relationship between her parents, the expectations her mother had of her and which weren’t fulfilled, taking the reader to various places, the university where she teaches, the trattoria where she eats, alone, the bar, the swimming-pool, the supermarket, a friend’s holiday home in the country, the doctor’s waiting room. this was clean and thoughtful, very ahead of its time — it has a sigrid nunez/sheila heti reflectiveness and coolness that feels very of this year — but there was some feeling of it being a little shallow or effortful. Her prose has the kind of exacting tone that I often like but this pared back set of vignettes almost feels like a parody of the voice of Rachel Cusk's Fay from her Outline trilogy, but without the experimental innovation or the interest.

The story unfolds in vignettes, sometimes only a single page long, all triggered by her location, with chapter titles such as: On the Street, In the Piazza, In My Head, At the Beautician, etc.

Having read, and deeply empathised with, Lahiri’s In Other Words—a nonfiction work in which she interrogates her love for and struggles with the Italian language—I was looking forward to Dove mi trovo. And the fifth shining star was given because Lahiri moved to Italy quite a few years ago embracing the country, the culture and the language. In an interview she deemed ‘the idea of my own creation in Italian not having a life in English yet interesting’, assuming that for translating her book she 'will have to go into a place where she is two people’.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But because the story is deliberately vague, a sort of build-up game is offered to its readers who are invited to make what they want of its missing details, reasons and possibilities. The titles of these chapters in fact refer to the place—not always a ‘physical’ one such as in the case of the recurring ‘Tra sé e sé’ chapters (an expression that for the life of me I cannot translate in English)—she is in or thinking of.