Dove mi trovo

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Whereabouts seemed like someone was reading diary entries to me. A middle aged woman, unnamed, living in some city (probably somewhere in Italy) tells her 'stories' of her daily encounters. No real story there, just pieces of thoughts here and there. Lahiri made a move to Italy some time ago and since her writing has changed a bit. With her previous novels, she wrote in English. Here, she wrote this in Italian and then she translated it to English. This is a short book. Perhaps it was more of a goal of writing a book in Italian, and then do the translation vs a story.

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My favourite chapters are about the character and her mother. That's complicated but so well-written. This book is beyond beautiful, the writing is precise, moving, and gives you this calming effect that you are exactly where you need to be. In Whereabouts we follow a woman who is a professor at a university, Lahiri takes us through her daily wonderings to the supermarket, vacation, pool and friend’s dinner. We get the inner workings of her mind, how she views herself, the people and the world around her. There is a strong presence of aloneness but strength in owning your time and being fine with being alone. Realising I was reading a novel in Dutch that was translated from the Italian written by a Bengali-American author who chose to leave the language she used to write in behind and express herself in a newly acquired foreign language, puzzled me and made me wonder if I was possibly reading Lahiri’s thoughts as if diluted through a double filter. Why an author would chose deliberately to substitute the precision instrument that is one’s mastery of a language for one that can only be a blunter one, rendering what is perhaps solely an approximate expression of one’s thoughts?

About the Author

As I was writing Dove mi trovo, the thought of it being anything other than an Italian text felt irrelevant. While writing, one must keep one’s eyes on the road, straight ahead, and not contemplate or anticipate driving down another. The dangers, for the writer as for the driver, are obvious.

Trans italiana a milano calda passionale ♥ incontri trans Trans italiana a milano calda passionale ♥ incontri trans

Every blow of my life took place in spring. Each lasting sting. That's why Im afflicted by the green of the trees, the first peaches in the market, the light of flowing skirts that the women in my neighborhood start to wear. These things only remind me of loss, of betrayal, of disappointment. I dislike waking up and feeling pushed inevitably forward. But today, Saturday, I don't have to leave the house."And yet she loved it, especially for the world of books it opened up. “I love it still,” she says now. “But at the same time, emotionally it represented this sort of impossible challenge. My relationship with English was always very much part of the desire as a child to be fully part of that world.” Paradoxically, the fact there was “not even a question of really belonging” in Italy finally freed her from being caught between two languages, “that is to say, having to choose between two ways of being, two ways of thinking”, she explains. “ In poche parole, in few words, it has given me a true sense of belonging, fully recognising that it is ‘a sense’.” Is there any place we're not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, severed, turned around. I spring from these terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold She has always felt she existed in “a kind of linguistic exile” long before she left for Rome. She was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and the family moved to the US when she was two. Growing up in Rhode Island (her father, like many of her characters, worked at the university), with frequent trips to Calcutta, she felt her story to be “much more complicated” than those of her school friends: “There was always ‘the other place’ and ‘the other language’ and ‘the other world’.” Bengali, which she spoke until she was four, is both her mother tongue and “a foreign language”, because she can’t read or write it: it is her parents’ language, “the language of their world”. Lahiri and her sister were educated in English, which she came to regard as a bullying “stepmother”. “Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me?” she asks in In Other Words. “The most obvious answer is the English language.” An unnamed narrator in an unnamed Italian city recounts a year in her life through a series of short, simple, quiet vignettes, each stamped by a "whereabout" in her life: In the Hotel; By the Sea; In My Head, At the Coffee Bar, etc. She is a university professor in her mid-forties, single, never married, mourning her father who died when she was fifteen, and feeling vaguely guilty about her aging mother, who also lives alone in another city. She's an understated introvert in an ebullient culture that values large groups of friends and family members, that prizes abundance in its art, music and food. She carefully segments her time to fill the spaces in her life: the hours at work, meals in local trattoria, twice-weekly swims, reading before bed, the weekend's empty hours when she can hide under the covers all day if she chooses.

Ale OF – Telegram

Personally....I’m a little tired about the emphasis that Lahiri wrote this in Italian....then translated it to English. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote, "Lahiri's poetic flourishes and spare, conversational prose are on full display." [8] Italiani all’estero (attraverso l’anagrafe consolare, la tutela e l’assistenza a residenti e turisti, gli interventi in situazioni di emergenza, i servizi consolari, i detenuti italiani all’estero e la sottrazione internazionale di minori); This is the kind of writing that is easy to slap the label 'navel-gazing' upon but that would be ungracious. Not everything has to be "oh! look at the state of the world", it can be about solitude, the pleasure of figs and the delights of the local stationery shop.Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and later received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998). I listened to my parents and did what they asked me to. Even though, in the end, I never made them happy. re-read: I was curious to read Lahiri's self-translation, just to see whether I would like it us much as the original, and I can confirm that I did. I'm glad Lahiri translated the novel herself and I can't actually decide if I preferred this English translation or its original Italian version. Anyway, I loved re-experiencing the story through a different lens. Feeling more like an exercise than a fully formed novel, Whereabouts marks Lahiri's return to fiction for the first time in nearly 8 years. We follow an unnamed female narrator in her mid-40s who lives, presumably, in Italy. Everything is anonymized. She has no strong ties to anyone or anything, though she mentions her family (in passing or in reflective moments on old memories) and her co-workers, nothing is concrete.