I’m pretty sure that Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book, Whereabouts, will polarise readers. Some will adore the simplicity and elegance of capturing life’s tiny moments, others will find it underwhelming.

The structure of Whereabouts is less a cohesive narrative and more a series of vignettes held together by overarching themes of loneliness, solitude and alienation. The unnamed protagonist is a single, ‘slightly on edge’ middle-aged woman living in an unspecified city. Each micro-chapter captures a moment in her day (‘On the sidewalk’ or ‘In the pool’ or ‘At the beautician’), conveyed in a stream-of-consciousness style. Lahiri examines these moments forensically and over the course of the book these accumulate to form a mosaic of this woman’s life. It’s difficult to provide anything more than this very vague summation.

Much kudos to Lahiri for originally writing this in Italian (not her native tongue), and subsequently translating it into English. Her style is minimalistic, using words sparingly with almost no embellishment in the prose. This is refreshing and also serves to deepen our appreciation of her main character’s sense of alienation.

I loved the ambition of Whereabouts – Lahiri is challenging the conventional form and content of a novel, and, in addition, doing it in a language foreign to her. Yet, the execution didn’t work for me: there simply wasn’t enough character or plot in the book to establish the necessary toehold in the writing.

While Whereabouts will likely delight other writers and poets, I’m not convinced about its appeal beyond that demographic.

Reviewed by Louise Falconer