Jhumpa Lahiri

The book is a series of loosely connected, mostly lyrical short stories linked by the voices of both the narrator and the protagonist, a middle-aged single woman for whom loneliness is a life choice. She guides us through the places of her everyday life and holidays, and we witness the painstaking way in which her private “self“ builds a relationship with the world. We might assume that Italy is the microcosm where the narrator finds herself. Still, her ability to narrate human life and the passage of time through space, rather than identifying specific places, is what engages the reader. Thanks to her extraordinary observation talent and precise yet disciplined expressive language, she is a great companion and guide to places where we might see ourselves, too.

Published by Argo, 2023

Jhumpa Lahiri (her real name is Nilandžana Sudešna, * 1967) was born in London as a second-generation immigrant: her parents are from Calcutta, but she grew up in the USA, where her family had moved. She studied creative writing and comparative studies at Boston University and earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies there. From 2011 to 2015, she lived in Rome with her husband and two children, extending her language migration between English and Bengali to include Italian, in which she began writing and translating from. Her books Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth were published in Czech in 2009 and 2010, respectively.