Roman Stories
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Picador
ISBN: 978-1035017577
224pp.

For a little over a decade, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has found herself in a self-imposed linguistic exile. An acclaimed Anglophone novelist and short story writer, she has started writing in Italian to escape the perceived tyranny of the English language.

This literary metamorphosis has enriched her oeuvre and provided her a doorway to explore new creative possibilities. Her initial works in Italian include autobiographical works, essays and an accomplished novel, all of which have been translated into English.

Roman Stories, Lahiri’s new collection of stories originally conceived in Italian and later rendered in English, marks the author’s long-awaited return to short fiction.

Roman Stories is a homecoming of sorts for Lahiri, who is one of the finest short story writers in the English language. Above all, the collection ventures into familiar terrain and examines the aspirations and follies of people who make a voyage between disparate worlds.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s long-awaited return to the short-story genre is a moving collection about the lives of foreigners from various socio-economic backgrounds, races, creeds and ages who have settled in Italy

Drawing upon the experiences of Indians and Indian Americans, Lahiri’s previous collections — Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth — presented compelling meditations on exile, belonging and alienation. Roman Stories builds on a similar motif, but explores these themes through a broader lens.

The nine stories in Lahiri’s latest collection aren’t set in familiar locales, such as New England or Bengal, which have figured prominently in her earlier work. Instead, the bulk of the action in these tales takes place in Italy, the country where she has carved out a home for herself in recent years.

Intriguingly, many of Lahiri’s characters remain unnamed — barring a few who are identified through initials. Names, as indicated in the author’s first novel The Namesake, are the measure of cultural affiliations and possess the power to unite and alienate us from people. Stripped of this crucial tool for identification, her characters gain the freedom to emerge as full-blooded individuals on the page rather than as cultural representatives.

Lahiri also shies away from supplying any information about their nationality, ethnicity and race. These unusual techniques lend a refreshing universality to the short stories, as it allows readers to embrace the sheer humanness of the characters without any preconceived notions.

The title of the collection is reminiscent of Alberto Moravia’s Roman Tales, which offers a glimpse into the experiences of marginalised segments of Rome after the Second World War. Fuelled by similar motivations, Roman Stories paints a moving portrait of the lives of foreigners from various socio-economic backgrounds, races, creeds and ages who have settled in Italy.

If the purpose of fiction is to hold up a mirror to society, Lahiri’s stories may act as a counter to the far-right, anti-immigrant policies that have gained currency in modern-day Italy. However, fiction cannot offer an antidote to social problems and instead reveals how they affect people’s lives. Roman Stories seeks to do just that by presenting a whole gamut of experiences.

The collection is structured like a crescendo, with each successive story mining a darker vein of truth about the immigrant experience in Italy. The author has arranged the stories in three sections, possibly in order of their scale of intensity.

In the first part, Lahiri examines the subtle overlaps between the lives of the natives and Rome’s new inhabitants. The four stories in Part I show Italians and foreigners taking tentative steps towards coexistence, albeit with mixed results.

‘The Boundary’ is about a girl whose family settles in the countryside after her immigrant father becomes the victim of a racist attack. As she grapples with loneliness in a rustic landscape and the lingering effects of intergenerational trauma, she develops a near-voyeuristic fascination with a family of native holidaymakers who stay in the house next door. 

In ‘The Reentry’, two women who return to Rome after a long hiatus dine at a trattoria (an Italian-style eatery). A girl at the establishment makes an irresponsible remark about one of the women, who has “darker hair and darker skin.” This story is a moving meditation on the discreet yet potent ways in which racial prejudice operates.

With ‘P’s Parties’, Lahiri veers away from a subtle exploration of this theme and immerses readers in an explosive tale of a romance pursued exclusively in the mind. An unnamed Italian man is infatuated 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 verge on an unhealthy obsession. ‘P’s Parties’ is a powerful evocation of the dangers of romanticising the ‘other’.

‘Well-Lit House’ goes even deeper than the other stories in the first section by offering a biting critique of racist tendencies. In this heartbreaking tale, a refugee family acquires a house through a municipal agency. This hard-earned reward for a lifetime of displacement eventually morphs into a curse. Assailed by the xenophobic attitude of their neighbours, the family is forced out of their sanctuary.

Part II comprises a six-part vignette set in modern Rome, titled ‘The Steps’, which explores the disparate lives of residents who regularly pass through a flight of stone steps. Each of them have cultivated homes in the city but continue to negotiate the boundaries between separate worlds. The titular steps aren’t just a physical landmark. On the contrary, they provide a point of confluence and solidify their connection to Italy. ‘The Steps’ is the spiritual core of Roman Stories and the stories in the next section derive their critical thrust from it.

The four tales in Part III seek to understand the root of racial violence. ‘The Delivery’, which is about a dark-skinned housekeeper who is shot by a man on a scooter, is interwoven with a first-person account of the attacker. Through this technique, the author seeks to comprehend his motivations without needlessly justifying them.

Other stories draw heavily upon the courage required to deal with such difficult circumstances. In ‘Notes’, a woman receives threatening notes at a school where she works. She eventually resorts to a bizarre childhood habit to tackle the situation.

‘Dante Alighieri’ delves into the psyche of a woman who reflects on her numerous infidelities against her loved ones on two continents. Fuelled by the guilt and the healing power of memory, this tale stands out for its realistic portrait of displacement and belonging.

Some pieces in Roman Stories offer a reinterpretation of Lahiri’s tales in Interpreter of Maladies. For instance, the circumstances in ‘The Procession’ mirrors those in her earlier story titled ‘A Temporary Matter.’ In both stories, couples grapple with the loss of a child and adopt different means of coping with their pain.

Similarly, ‘Well-Lit House’ is a possible reinterpretation of ‘This Blessed House’, Lahiri’s poignant story about an Indian couple who moves into a house and learns to accept the Christian paraphernalia left by the previous inhabitants. ‘Well-Lit House’ reverses this scenario and explores the consequences that may arise when inhabitants bring their own distinct aura into their new home.

Roman Stories not only reflect Lahiri’s ability to make a voyage between languages, but also marks a subtle recalibration of her creative boundaries.

The reviewer is the author of Typically Tanya and co-editor of The Stained-Glass Window: Stories of the Pandemic from Pakistan. X: @TahaKehar

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 25th, 2024