My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I’m me and also someone else, that I’m leaving and also staying. I don't know - this just feels underwhelming to me, a sort of generic version of contemporary 'literary women's writing' that never engaged or connected with me - instantly forgettable, in my case, I'm afraid. Even in those occasions where she interacts with others—who also remain unmanned and are referred to as her former lover, her friend, a professor, etc—she remains a lonely person. Lahiri is known for her short stories, novels and essays in English, and, more recently, in Italian.

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’. If I had a mild disappointment with the book it is that I had hoped the process of writing in a third language (the author’s mother tongue was Bengali) and self-translating into English – would mean that the author would bring a new perspective to English – a new way of assembling the language to explore and express ideas – and I did not really sense that (in fact in some ways the opposite - a perhaps deliberate downplay of English).

I found Whereabouts rather listless, about an unnamed woman wandering and meandering around a European city. At the same time, as I read this I kept wishing I wrote about my own life this way, at least just for myself. La donna al centro della storia oscilla tra immobilità e movimento, tra la ricerca di identificazione con un luogo e il rifiuto, allo stesso tempo, di creare legami permanenti. I could be riding a train or traveling by car or flying in a plane, among the clouds that drift and spread on all sides like a mass of jellyfish in the air. 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.

I loved that novel a lot and had other titles by Lahiri on my list when I learned that she had written another book in Italian. Jhumpa Lahiri wrote the book when she was living in Rome, and the chapter titles such as "At the Trattoria" and "In the Piazza" indicate an Italian setting. I’ve created Instantly Italy to take you to Italy with me and explore together this crazy but “oh so lovely” country.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.

Different from her other books, one can see at various times, glimpses of old self, her previous works. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer. Nelle ultime parole di questa sorta di romanzo a episodi, l'autrice tenta di spiegare come la vita con le sue piccole e insignificanti vicende vada assaporata briciola dopo briciola. Even the narrator sees her double, a woman who looks like her and whom she follows and loses in the crowd.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.