And I think that's - I mean, that's plot, right? And that's what I convey to my students - that plot can be a very subtle thing as well. So she does change, right? And her circumstances change. Without giving away (laughter) a plot twist, she's locking up her apartment and heading for an adventure in yet another place that you don't quite name. She's moving literally from place to place. And she's actually in movement, right? She's actually very much in movement. There's a consciousness, you know, at the center, a character who's observing, who's moving through her days, through her weeks, through the course of a year. And so in that sense, there is a plot, I would argue. Plot is a sequence of actions that accumulate and affect some sort of change. LAHIRI: Well, you know, there's plot, and there's plot. There are no plot twists here, which is - it's a very brave thing to do in a novel. There's not - like, usually when I'm interviewing the author of a novel, I'm taking great care not to give away plot twists. They are very short chapters or episodes, but that maybe alerts people listening, there's not really much plot here. You talked about writing the episodes of this book. KELLY: I want to take note of something you just said. And in that sense, I think this book is really looking at sort of the more existential question of, who are we, and how do we proceed? How do we proceed through life with others and without others?

And I think it puts into focus for me the reality, I think, that we all have to have and have to acknowledge a relationship with our solitude. And I think the book is about her relationship with her solitude. And I think that, as you say, she has a relationship with her solitude. And in my case, I started putting her in different places to better understand her. But that's the process of writing, right? You write, and you discover the character as you move forward. LAHIRI: Well, it was who she was, right? And I didn't know who she was in the beginning, so I was exploring over the course of writing the episodes, trying to understand who she was. And sometimes she seems to resent it, and other times she seems to revel in it. I was struck over and over by how isolated, lonely she is. KELLY: Let's talk about her, and let's talk about the. She was just a - she is opposed to a woman with a name. Again, as I said, when I started writing in Italian, it just came out, and I didn't think to myself coherently, oh, I'm going to not write this character's name. And I think this can actually - and does lead to a lot of very grave problems in the world and for our society and for the way we communicate and exist and coexist. I think we can become too fixated on who we are and where we're from. I think that identity can be a trap at times. But I think that if we take away the names of the places, the name of the city, it's more open. So I was acutely aware of place.Īnd so I think that this book really - it distills for me so many of the themes that I've been working at and worrying over in my writing from the very beginning about place and about the meaning of place. I was engaging with, absorbing a new world.

And I felt that when I started writing in Italian, I had just moved to Rome, and I myself was displaced. My previous body of work - all of the work in English - was so deeply entrenched in names, places, what it meant to be from Calcutta but living in Boston. LAHIRI: This has been a choice that has been in place for more or less all of my writing in Italian. KELLY: And why hold back on all the little, identifying geographic details? You tell us we're in the piazza.

The book was born in Rome and set in my head in Rome and written almost entirely on return visits to Rome. LAHIRI: (Laughter) Yes, I did very much so. Am I also correct in thinking you might have had Rome, Italy in mind? KELLY: So I believe I'm correct in saying you never come out and tell us where the novel is set. The novel is titled 'Whereabouts,' and Jhumpa Lahiri is with us now. And just to make things a little more challenging, Lahiri wrote it in Italian first, then translated it into English. And yet, improbably, there is a delicious sense of place. The book is short, stripped of the usual details and specifics that authors use to build a plot and characters. We never learn the main character's name. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel is all about small, intimate moments playing out in public places.

Conversations with tyler jhumpa lahiri