PositiveThe Hindustan Times (IND)The narrator’s relationship with the city she calls home, and its inhabitants, is marked by knowing and not-knowing...This incongruity lies at the heart of this novel, which is saturated with the dualities — they are many — of light and shadow, stillness and movement, exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement, contentment and dissatisfaction. Told in fragments, in pared-down prose, it’s a portrait of the modern epidemic of urban loneliness ... By divesting the novel of proper pronouns, she lends it a touch of universality. We know that it’s not the story of just one life, but many lives: the story of the collective condition of the in-between people inhabiting the shifting world where identity, being and belonging are all in a constant state of flux. In being minimal and spare, it sparkles. Lahiri’s new place and language have provided her with a new window through which she looks at the world. In Whereabouts, she makes the most of that window.
