Sleeping with Jhumpa Lahiri

 Since last Sunday I have been reading 2 books in parallel - Whereabouts & Roman Stories. It’s kind of night cap. Reading such beautiful writing. I am reading her after a very long time - maybe a decade or more but I can still remember her style and sharp way she writes. Between the 2 I like whereabouts - It’s different - almost like a blog. Since I also write in a similar fashion I could relate to it a lot. It’s kind of life under microscope, a moment in a day, or an experience or an upheaval.

Unfortunately or as it happens in our life I was also going thru one one upheaval. I am not as brave as Jhumpa to go public but I write / journal every morning. Yes, it definitely helps in venting and taking a positive turn or break the downward spiral. And begin my day with a fresh voice ringing in my head. I tried a bit modified it a bit when I wrote the previous post (The slow passage of time). Whereabout became my bedside book before sleep caught up with me.

Whereabouts is about loneliness and how a person deals with it. In one hand, It’s a simple portrayal of daily life but it’s so much more. It’s not about the activity but what’s going on in our mind. The 1000’s of conversation which we have in our mind. Many of those become an action but most of them dies.  Many move from past to present to past to a possible future, an expectation of a beautiful future or a negative one to avoid.

This is also true for Roman Stories, memories, musings but unlike Whereabouts these are stories which has an end and a beginning. Most of them are nice - I just finished reading Steps - where the steps becomes a metaphor for tell multiple stories about people who use the steps. So there are 5 or 6 stories with The Steps. Like most short stories these are are about relationships, incidents, anger but what’s different this time is it’s all set in Rome, Italy and so it captures the hues and layers of the city, the architecture, the beauty and the decay. 

If you are a Jhumpa Lahiri fan like me -  you will love them. Both these books were first written in Italian and then translated to English.