📚🚶Introducing our May book
Discover Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Dear walking book clubbers,
Welcome to May! The perfect month to read this dreamy book about a woman in mid-life in an nameless Italian city. (See how I’m tying that in to last week’s newsletter about Rome!?) You’ll be thrilled to hear that it is a very slim book, so you DEFINITELY still have more than enough time to read it before our walks this Friday and Sunday. Gosh those have come around fast this month.
Read on to find:
Details of our May events, including links to book tickets.
Discussion points to get you thinking about Whereabouts
Links to read and listen on.
News of June.
Our May Whereabouts events
Please note that for the benefit of your fellow walkers, you need to have read the book before coming along to a walking book club. If you’ve not read the book, you are very welcome to join the zoom instead.
Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 9th May, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-£20
Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club Sunday 11th May, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-£20
Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 12th May, 8-9pm, £1-£15
Buy Whereabouts from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.
ALSO, if you like the look of all three of our summer books (details HERE) you could save yourself a lot of clicking and book in to all three Regent’s Park walks or Hampstead Heath walks with these buttons:
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Introduction & Discussion Points
This slender, haunting novel, comprised of a series of vignettes, follows a woman in her late 40s adrift in an unnamed Italian city. While little happens by way of plot, Lahiri beautifully renders the narrator’s wanderings and wonderings, which culminate in a moment of change. This is the first novel to be written in Italian and then translated into English by the prize-winning Bengali-American writer, whose short story collection Unaccustomed Earth was a very popular previous walking book club pick.
Here are are few discussion points to get you thinking:
Death in life It’s one of the great themes, pondered over in art and literature forever, and here it makes its presence felt from the very first page, where the narrator describes her morning walk past the plaque to the man who died, aged 44, on that same sidewalk. And let’s not forget the decapitated mouse, later on. Can you find other moments where death stalks the narrative? Why do you think this is such a preoccupation for the narrator? And what effect does this spectral presence have on your reading of the book?
Movement vs stasis There’s a great deal of walking around, but very much within the confines of this unnamed city; the narrator comes to tussle with the decision to stay where she is rooted or to move on elsewhere. I love the metaphor for this in her beloved shop that used to sell stationery (which, if you spell it differently, of course means saying still - although I don’t think this is the case with the Italian) that now sells suitcases. Can you relate to this push-pull of place and belonging? By which I suppose I mean the comfort and companionship of having roots somewhere, versus the desire to ‘push past the barrier of my life’.
Solitude and companionship The narrator is very much alone - ‘solitude: it’s become my trade’ - and yet there are masses of other characters that come and go in the pages of the book. What is the nature of her relationships with these other characters? Does she connect meaningfully, or positively, with some of them? Does the narrator find moments of companionship?
Of course, there’s much more to discuss! I can’t wait to hear your thoughts when we meet up.
More about Jhumpa Lahiri
Tim Parks in the the LRB gives a great analysis of the book, HERE.
HERE is a somewhat ambivalent review by Madeleine Thien for the New York Times. I like the way she interrogates the structure of the book and compares it to a photographer’s contact sheet. (Incidentally, I’m interviewing Madeleine Thien about her new book at the Owl Bookshop on 27th May, tickets HERE.) And HERE is another fascinating piece in the New York Times, this one by Joumana Khatib, which focuses on Lahiri’s movement between Englisn and Italian.
THIS thoughtful piece by Tanjil Rashid for the Guardian also focusses on Lahiri’s choice to shift from writing in English to Italian, and the abstract nature of her work.
Finally, do listen to THIS excellent interview with Jhumpa Lahiri about the book on City Arts & Lectures.
📚🚶June
Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark
It’s London, 1949, and Fleur Talbot is working on her first novel and short of money. When she gets a secretarial job for the pompous director of the Autobiographical Association and he steals her work-in-progress, life begins to imitate fiction with extremely dangerous results… First published in 1981, this remains one of Spark’s wittiest, most delightful novels; it’s the third by this Scottish minor genius that we’ve discussed in the group.
Curious to know more? Listen to THIS episode of the Booker Prize podcast all about it.
Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 20th June, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-£20
Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club Sunday 22nd June, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-£20
Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 23rd June, 8-9pm, £1-£15
Buy Loitering with Intent from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.
Happy reading!
Emily