Review: Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

They are professors, spouses, temporary workers, tourists, refugees, children of immigrants… people from different parts of the world, all negotiating their foreignness, sometimes around pretty ordinary circumstances like a simple meal, other times facing racist attacks or hostility.

These nine stories show moments of vulnerability, a feeling heightened by the nameless-placeless-ness of Lahiri’s characters. Lahiri does not disclose their names and — save for a couple of American exceptions — only hints at where they could presumably be from.

A nanny is from a humid city filled with crows, palm trees and dust. Elsewhere, a young housekeeper comes from a country that her employer often travels to — “to visit temples and cleanse her system of toxins… She tells me she loves the textiles and the colours of the buildings and the way women move their bodies. She shows me pictures on her cell phone of the ruddy dirt roads, the white sandy beaches.” Two women, referred to as the one in mourning and the one who is a university professor, meet for lunch. It’s a charming setting — they meet at a hidden homey sort of trattoria that the grieving woman would frequent growing up. But this cosy restaurant evokes a sense of unease and otherness in the professor, a foreigner, who has lived in Rome a long time and often thinks of it as the only place she feels at home. This insider-outsider thing is what most of these characters have in common. They live in Rome but they are never entirely at home, experiencing, in varying degrees feelings of alienation, everyday racism and aggression. The anti-immigrant rhetoric of Italy’s far right and the ensuing hatred is explored quite viscerally in a few of these stories.

In Well-lit House, the most devastating in the collection, a refugee couple with their young children into a sunny new flat. “A white light would bathe our souls while we made love,” the husband recounts. He had moved to Italy as a child after soldiers had killed his grandfather, and the family had to flee their war-torn land. The new apartment is lovely, everything seems to be going well. A friendly elderly neighbour even “admired the way my wife’s veil framed her face, saying it made her look like the noble women from long ago, the ones you see in faded or darkened paintings in churches and museums.” But this bliss does not last. In these stories, tragedy unfolds gently. It feels unexpected even when you can see it coming.

Racism is especially potent in the hands of children. And they catapult it more than once in this collection. In Notes, a woman takes up a temporary job at a school and finds, repeatedly, unpleasant notes in children’s handwriting, in her bag or pockets. Later in the story, she rips them into pieces. The bits of torn paper “looked almost like thick grains of sugar you’d sprinkle on top of a panettone or a colomba or certain cookies.” In this way, using all kinds of warm and fuzzy metaphors, Lahiri offsets the misery and humiliation her characters suffer. Devastation lands softly and her characters accept it quietly. This passive acceptance of fate is omnipresent in Lahiri’s fiction in general. There’s an undertow of sadness that her characters carry. It sometimes feels as if they’re just floating along like ghosts. But Lahiri’s sentences — the metaphors she employs, the scenic descriptions and details — contain sunlight, food, books and all kinds of cosy, comforting things. There’s perfume that smells of salt, pigeons with twigs in their mouths, river the “colour of tea with a few spoonfuls of milk,” starlings in the sky “appearing and disappearing like tornadoes or ribbons or giant tadpoles made of ash…”

In Roman Stories, Rome is all but faint yet pleasing background music. The characters eat at trattorias, walk across bridges and piazzas, occasionally there are some specific food or cultural or linguistic references. But the heft of that magnificent city — the millennia of history, the romance of its art and architecture, the magic of the place — is not what this book is about and it hardly ever comes up. The characters speak of their city in the way that people everywhere do, saying generic things like, “This city is shit…But so damn beautiful.”

The book is divided into three parts and the heart of it is a single long story, told through vignettes set around a stairway. Only people familiar with the city would be able to guess it’s ostensibly the Spanish Steps — I only had an inkling because a character is making a film about a drummer for Garibaldi, too short to take part in battle, was killed at the top of the staircase by a French soldier. A hint that this isn’t an ordinary stairway.

Lahiri’s characters experience these steps as a place which teenagers occupy smoking and drinking late at night, “like flies on a slice of melon.” They all see the staircase differently. The nanny from the country with crows, palm trees and dust, sees the beer bottle caps “scattered like buttons or like clamshells along the coastline. Empty plastic cups on their sides sway from right to left like the bright beam of a lighthouse that flashes methodically over black water.” For the filmmaker, “these steps turn into a kind of ancient amphitheatre, with groups of teenagers seated out in the open, waiting to watch some tragedy unfold.”

Roman Stories feels like an advanced puzzle book. It’s filled with clues for all that remains unstated — identity, geography, Rome, feelings, things Lahiri has talked about in real life… — there’s so much that is hinted at. I also found myself, like in those hidden picture games where you have to find items or people tucked into a detail busy drawing of a scene, circling every passing reference of foreigners: a narrator’s daughter who works with asylum seekers, another’s son who lives abroad in a multiethnic neighbourhood with his girlfriend “who has parents from two different continents,” or the few kids with different features and darker complexions among the teenagers on the steps… These nine stories contain hundreds of foreigners and endless potential for interaction.

In P’s Parties, the most enjoyable story in the collection, an Italian writer describes his encounters with a mysterious foreign woman at annual parties thrown by his friend P. “I’d never betrayed my wife in this city, where everyone’s always cheating on everyone,” he says. I found myself looking this up for whatever reason and found, splattered on tabloids everywhere from the time, news of a 2010 survey that found that about half Italians have affairs — infidelity is most prevalent in Milan, with Rome a close second. An interview of the Italian author Guia Soncini in The Cut, quoted her book I Mariti delle Altre (Other Women’s Husbands) — “We are a republic founded on adultery.”

These stories were written in Italian, the language Lahiri now writes in — all her work in the last decade has been written in Italian. A memoir about her love for the language, In Other Words (2015), was translated into English by Ann Goldstein, widely known for translating Elena Ferrante. But Lahiri now translates herself mostly. But four of these stories have been translated by her editor Todd Portnowitz. These Roman stories were previously published in Italian and a few English translations in The New Yorker.

Lahiri began writing in Italian, which she had been privately learning for decades, her third language after Bengali and English, after moving to Rome in 2012. She had enormous, consistent success since the publication of her first book, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). That book, a collection of short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Then her first novel, The Namesake (2003), became an international hit and was adapted into the film of the same name starring Tabu, Irrfan and Kal Penn. Her second novel, The Lowland, published soon after she relocated, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

After moving her family to Italy, Lahiri began working in America: she started teaching creative writing at Princeton University, dividing her time between the two countries.

Since then, she has retired the hitherto mainstay of her fiction: Bengali Indian-Americans drawn heavily from her family and friends. Her first novel in Italian, Whereabout, which she translated into English herself, is about an unnamed middle-aged woman wandering around Rome and reflecting on her life. Lahiri’s writing — despite the distance from identity and form — continues to be deeply autobiographical.

There are glimpses of Lahiri everywhere — a seed of something she had said in an interview or written somewhere is planted heavily in these stories. There is the professor who, like Lahiri, thinks of Rome as the only place she has ever felt at home. Lahiri’s mother had worked in the elementary school where she received racist hate mail, like the woman in Notes. And the circumstances of the protagonist of the last story, Dante Alighieri, are closely modelled on Lahiri’s own — a woman, the daughter of immigrants in America, moves to Rome with her family and then takes up a teaching job back in the States, dividing her time between the two continents — providing some kind of context to her decision to live this way.

These are stories of great significance in this time of global migrations and xenophobia. Lahiri’s Bengali-American fiction explored the sense of belonging and alienation that the prominent model-minority class of Indians experienced in America in the late 20th century. Now, she captures the hard-hitting shift — the global migration crisis of this century — in stories that are evocative, and really, things of beauty.

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.

In Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, mysterious foreigners mingle, sometimes simply exist, in Rome.

They are professors, spouses, temporary workers, tourists, refugees, children of immigrants… people from different parts of the world, all negotiating their foreignness, sometimes around pretty ordinary circumstances like a simple meal, other times facing racist attacks or hostility.

These nine stories show moments of vulnerability, a feeling heightened by the nameless-placeless-ness of Lahiri’s characters. Lahiri does not disclose their names and — save for a couple of American exceptions — only hints at where they could presumably be from.

A nanny is from a humid city filled with crows, palm trees and dust. Elsewhere, a young housekeeper comes from a country that her employer often travels to — “to visit temples and cleanse her system of toxins… She tells me she loves the textiles and the colours of the buildings and the way women move their bodies. She shows me pictures on her cell phone of the ruddy dirt roads, the white sandy beaches.” Two women, referred to as the one in mourning and the one who is a university professor, meet for lunch. It’s a charming setting — they meet at a hidden homey sort of trattoria that the grieving woman would frequent growing up. But this cosy restaurant evokes a sense of unease and otherness in the professor, a foreigner, who has lived in Rome a long time and often thinks of it as the only place she feels at home. This insider-outsider thing is what most of these characters have in common. They live in Rome but they are never entirely at home, experiencing, in varying degrees feelings of alienation, everyday racism and aggression. The anti-immigrant rhetoric of Italy’s far right and the ensuing hatred is explored quite viscerally in a few of these stories.

In Well-lit House, the most devastating in the collection, a refugee couple with their young children into a sunny new flat. “A white light would bathe our souls while we made love,” the husband recounts. He had moved to Italy as a child after soldiers had killed his grandfather, and the family had to flee their war-torn land. The new apartment is lovely, everything seems to be going well. A friendly elderly neighbour even “admired the way my wife’s veil framed her face, saying it made her look like the noble women from long ago, the ones you see in faded or darkened paintings in churches and museums.” But this bliss does not last. In these stories, tragedy unfolds gently. It feels unexpected even when you can see it coming.

Racism is especially potent in the hands of children. And they catapult it more than once in this collection. In Notes, a woman takes up a temporary job at a school and finds, repeatedly, unpleasant notes in children’s handwriting, in her bag or pockets. Later in the story, she rips them into pieces. The bits of torn paper “looked almost like thick grains of sugar you’d sprinkle on top of a panettone or a colomba or certain cookies.” In this way, using all kinds of warm and fuzzy metaphors, Lahiri offsets the misery and humiliation her characters suffer. Devastation lands softly and her characters accept it quietly. This passive acceptance of fate is omnipresent in Lahiri’s fiction in general. There’s an undertow of sadness that her characters carry. It sometimes feels as if they’re just floating along like ghosts. But Lahiri’s sentences — the metaphors she employs, the scenic descriptions and details — contain sunlight, food, books and all kinds of cosy, comforting things. There’s perfume that smells of salt, pigeons with twigs in their mouths, river the “colour of tea with a few spoonfuls of milk,” starlings in the sky “appearing and disappearing like tornadoes or ribbons or giant tadpoles made of ash…”

In Roman Stories, Rome is all but faint yet pleasing background music. The characters eat at trattorias, walk across bridges and piazzas, occasionally there are some specific food or cultural or linguistic references. But the heft of that magnificent city — the millennia of history, the romance of its art and architecture, the magic of the place — is not what this book is about and it hardly ever comes up. The characters speak of their city in the way that people everywhere do, saying generic things like, “This city is shit…But so damn beautiful.”

The book is divided into three parts and the heart of it is a single long story, told through vignettes set around a stairway. Only people familiar with the city would be able to guess it’s ostensibly the Spanish Steps — I only had an inkling because a character is making a film about a drummer for Garibaldi, too short to take part in battle, was killed at the top of the staircase by a French soldier. A hint that this isn’t an ordinary stairway.

Lahiri’s characters experience these steps as a place which teenagers occupy smoking and drinking late at night, “like flies on a slice of melon.” They all see the staircase differently. The nanny from the country with crows, palm trees and dust, sees the beer bottle caps “scattered like buttons or like clamshells along the coastline. Empty plastic cups on their sides sway from right to left like the bright beam of a lighthouse that flashes methodically over black water.” For the filmmaker, “these steps turn into a kind of ancient amphitheatre, with groups of teenagers seated out in the open, waiting to watch some tragedy unfold.”

Roman Stories feels like an advanced puzzle book. It’s filled with clues for all that remains unstated — identity, geography, Rome, feelings, things Lahiri has talked about in real life… — there’s so much that is hinted at. I also found myself, like in those hidden picture games where you have to find items or people tucked into a detail busy drawing of a scene, circling every passing reference of foreigners: a narrator’s daughter who works with asylum seekers, another’s son who lives abroad in a multiethnic neighbourhood with his girlfriend “who has parents from two different continents,” or the few kids with different features and darker complexions among the teenagers on the steps… These nine stories contain hundreds of foreigners and endless potential for interaction.

In P’s Parties, the most enjoyable story in the collection, an Italian writer describes his encounters with a mysterious foreign woman at annual parties thrown by his friend P. “I’d never betrayed my wife in this city, where everyone’s always cheating on everyone,” he says. I found myself looking this up for whatever reason and found, splattered on tabloids everywhere from the time, news of a 2010 survey that found that about half Italians have affairs — infidelity is most prevalent in Milan, with Rome a close second. An interview of the Italian author Guia Soncini in The Cut, quoted her book I Mariti delle Altre (Other Women’s Husbands) — “We are a republic founded on adultery.”

These stories were written in Italian, the language Lahiri now writes in — all her work in the last decade has been written in Italian. A memoir about her love for the language, In Other Words (2015), was translated into English by Ann Goldstein, widely known for translating Elena Ferrante. But Lahiri now translates herself mostly. But four of these stories have been translated by her editor Todd Portnowitz. These Roman stories were previously published in Italian and a few English translations in The New Yorker.

Lahiri began writing in Italian, which she had been privately learning for decades, her third language after Bengali and English, after moving to Rome in 2012. She had enormous, consistent success since the publication of her first book, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). That book, a collection of short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Then her first novel, The Namesake (2003), became an international hit and was adapted into the film of the same name starring Tabu, Irrfan and Kal Penn. Her second novel, The Lowland, published soon after she relocated, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

After moving her family to Italy, Lahiri began working in America: she started teaching creative writing at Princeton University, dividing her time between the two countries.

Since then, she has retired the hitherto mainstay of her fiction: Bengali Indian-Americans drawn heavily from her family and friends. Her first novel in Italian, Whereabout, which she translated into English herself, is about an unnamed middle-aged woman wandering around Rome and reflecting on her life. Lahiri’s writing — despite the distance from identity and form — continues to be deeply autobiographical.

There are glimpses of Lahiri everywhere — a seed of something she had said in an interview or written somewhere is planted heavily in these stories. There is the professor who, like Lahiri, thinks of Rome as the only place she has ever felt at home. Lahiri’s mother had worked in the elementary school where she received racist hate mail, like the woman in Notes. And the circumstances of the protagonist of the last story, Dante Alighieri, are closely modelled on Lahiri’s own — a woman, the daughter of immigrants in America, moves to Rome with her family and then takes up a teaching job back in the States, dividing her time between the two continents — providing some kind of context to her decision to live this way.

These are stories of great significance in this time of global migrations and xenophobia. Lahiri’s Bengali-American fiction explored the sense of belonging and alienation that the prominent model-minority class of Indians experienced in America in the late 20th century. Now, she captures the hard-hitting shift — the global migration crisis of this century — in stories that are evocative, and really, things of beauty.

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.