Roman Stories
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Picador
ISBN: 978-1035017577
224 pages.
For just over a decade, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has been in self-imposed linguistic exile. The celebrated English-language novelist and short story writer began writing in Italian to escape the tyranny of the English language.
This literary metamorphosis enriched her work and gave her the opportunity to explore new creative possibilities. Her first works in Italian include autobiographies, essays and a successful novel, all of which have been translated into English.
Roman Stories, Lahiri’s new collection of stories originally written in Italian and later translated into English, marks the author’s long-awaited return to the short story.
Roman Stories is a homecoming of sorts for Lahiri, one of the finest short story writers in the English language. But above all, the collection treads familiar ground, exploring the desires and follies of people journeying between different worlds.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s long-awaited return to the short story genre is a moving collection about the lives of foreigners from different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, faiths and ages who have settled in Italy.
Lahiri’s previous collections – Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth – draw on the experiences of Indians and Indian-Americans and offer compelling meditations on exile, belonging and alienation. Roman Stories takes up a similar motif but examines these themes from a broader perspective.
The nine stories in Lahiri’s latest collection are not set in familiar locations like New England or Bengal, which featured prominently in her earlier works. Instead, most of the action in these stories takes place in Italy, the country where she has made a home for herself in recent years.
Interestingly, many of Lahiri’s characters remain nameless – except for a few who are identified by their initials. Names, as suggested in the author’s first novel, The Namesake, are the measure of cultural belonging and have the power to unite and alienate us as people. Without this important means of identification, her characters are free to appear on paper as full individuals rather than cultural representatives.
Lahiri also shies away from providing information about her nationality, ethnicity and race. These unusual techniques give the short stories a refreshing universality, as they allow readers to grasp the pure humanity of the characters without any preconceived notions.
The title of the collection recalls Alberto Moravia’s novel Tales, which offers a glimpse into the experiences of marginalized parts of Rome after World War II. Drawing on similar themes, Roman Stories paints a moving portrait of the lives of foreigners from different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, faiths and age groups who have settled in Italy.
If the purpose of novels is to hold a mirror up to society, then Lahiri’s stories can be a counterpoint to the far-right, anti-immigrant policies that have gained traction in modern Italy. However, novels cannot provide an antidote to social problems; rather, they can show how they affect people’s lives. Roman Stories attempts to do just that, presenting a whole range of experiences.
The collection is built like a crescendo, with each subsequent story revealing a darker truth about the immigrant experience in Italy. The author has divided the stories into three sections, possibly in order of intensity.
In the first part, Lahiri explores the subtle overlaps between the lives of the locals and those of Rome’s new residents. The four stories in Part I show Italians and foreigners taking tentative steps toward coexistence, albeit with mixed results.
The Boundary is about a girl whose family settles in the countryside after her immigrant father is the victim of a racist attack. As she struggles with the loneliness of a rural area and the lingering effects of intergenerational trauma, she develops an almost voyeuristic fascination with a family of local vacationers living in the house next door.
In “The Reentry,” two women return to Rome after a long break and eat at a trattoria (an Italian restaurant). A girl in the restaurant makes an irresponsible remark about one of the women, who has “darker hair and darker skin.” This story is a moving reflection on the subtle but powerful workings of racial prejudice.
With P’s Parties, Lahiri deviates from a subtle exploration of this theme and immerses readers in an explosive tale of a romance pursued entirely in the mind. A nameless Italian man falls in love with a foreign woman at an annual party thrown by his wife’s friend. Unlike the girl in The Boundary, the man allows his curiosity to grow into an unhealthy obsession. P’s Parties is a powerful evocation of the dangers of romanticizing the “other.”
“Well-Lit House” goes even deeper than the other stories in the first section, offering a scathing critique of racist tendencies. In this heartbreaking story, a refugee family purchases a house through a municipal agency. This hard-won reward for a life of displacement eventually turns into a curse. The xenophobic attitude of their neighbors devastates the family and they are evicted from their place of refuge.
Part II consists of a six-part vignette set in modern Rome entitled “The Staircase,” which examines the diverse lives of the residents who regularly walk a stone staircase. Each of them has a well-kept home in the city, but continues to move between the boundaries between the different worlds. The titular staircase is not just a physical landmark. On the contrary, it represents a meeting point and cements their connection to Italy. “The Staircase” is the spiritual core of Roman Stories, and the stories in the next section draw their critical thrust from it.
The four stories in Part III attempt to understand the roots of racist violence. “The Delivery,” about a black housekeeper shot by a man on a scooter, is interwoven with a first-hand account of the attacker. This technique is used by the author to try to understand his motives without needlessly justifying them.
Other stories focus heavily on the courage required to cope with such difficult circumstances. In “Notes,” a woman receives threatening letters at the school where she works. She ends up resorting to a bizarre habit from her childhood to cope.
Dante Alighieri delves into the psyche of a woman reflecting on her numerous infidelities with loved ones across two continents. Driven by guilt and the healing power of memory, this story captivates with its realistic portrait of displacement and belonging.
Some pieces in Roman Stories offer a reinterpretation of Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies. For example, the circumstances in “The Procession” are similar to those in her earlier story, “A Temporary Matter.” In both stories, couples struggle with the loss of a child and find different ways to cope with their pain.
Similarly, “Well-Lit House” is a possible reinterpretation of “This Blessed House,” Lahiri’s poignant story about an Indian couple who move into a house and learn to accept the Christian paraphernalia left by the previous residents. “Well-Lit House” inverts that scenario and explores the consequences that can arise when residents bring their own, distinctive aura to their new home.
“Roman Stories” not only reflects Lahiri’s ability to travel between languages, but also marks a subtle recalibration of her creative boundaries.
The reviewer is the author of Typical Tanya and co-editor of The Stained-Glass Window: Stories of the Pandemic from Pakistan. X: @TahaKehar
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 25, 2024
