Current:Home > reviewsIn Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Roman Stories,' many characters are caught between two worlds -WorldMoney
In Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Roman Stories,' many characters are caught between two worlds
View
Date:2025-04-15 05:10:42
Readers who have missed the compelling narratives that Jhumpa Lahiri wrote in English before her switch to Italian in 2015 will be happy to learn that Roman Stories is a return to form.
This second book of fiction translated from her adopted language is broader in scope and more moving than her muted, somewhat underwhelming novel Whereabouts. Lahiri's focus here is no longer on generational conflicts between Southeast Asian immigrants and their American offspring. But her return to short stories — a form which she wielded so impressively in her 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies -- is also a return to fiction that powerfully conveys her characters' valiant efforts to navigate geographic and cultural relocations and find their place in the world.
Like Alberto Moravia's Roman Tales (1954), with its portraits of life in the poorer sections of Rome after the second world war, Lahiri shifts her attention in several of these nine stories from well-to-do expats and native Romans to new refugees and immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in a cruelly unwelcoming society. Particularly heartrending are stories like "Well-Lit House," which is narrated by a young man who gratefully lands in a 500-sq.-ft. apartment in a sketchy neighborhood outside Rome with his gracious, elegantly veiled wife and five small children after years in refugee camps and shared apartments — only to be hounded and chased from it by xenophobic neighbors.
In "The Steps," Lahiri offers a sobering view of modern Rome with a six-part portrait of residents who regularly pass through a flight of 126 stone steps, which have become a hangout for teens who perch on them "like flies on a slice of melon," leaving broken bottles and crushed cigarette packets in their wake. The steps become a twice-daily gauntlet for the hard-working woman who thinks of the 13-year-old son she's left behind with his grandparents on another continent while she cares for two young children and their working parents. A distrustful widow who refuses to have her groceries delivered "by some boy from another country" finds the gathered youth frightening. But for an American expat facing surgery in this foreign country — which her husband uses as a perch for his international business travels — the steps remind her of all that she misses in her former bucolic, wooded house outside New York, where she had hoped to raise their three sons.
Lahiri's characters are frequently ambushed — whether by unexpected emotions, like the husband caught off-guard by his adulterous feelings in "P's Parties" — or by actual assault, like the screenwriter mugged on the deserted steps late one night by a group of kids, who take his cash and the digital watch his young second wife gave him for his 60th birthday. In "The Delivery," a presumably dark-skinned housekeeper out on an errand for her patrona feels pretty plucky in her polka dot skirt — until she's felled in a drive-by attack by two boys on a motorino who derisively call out, "Go wash those dirty legs."
Many of Lahiri's characters are caught between two worlds. But in her recent fiction, the worlds are never specifically identified. Even those born in Roman suffer from a sense of foreignness; they all remain nameless — in sharp contrast with those in her earlier work, such as Gogol Ganguli, the hero of her first novel, The Namesake. This highlights the loss of identity that comes with relocation and alienation, and suggests the universality of such situations. But with this lack of specificity comes a disconcerting remoteness — and, at times, an unwieldy akwardness. In "The Reentry," another story about racial prejudice, the two unnamed women meeting at a trattoria are referred to repeatedly as "the woman in mourning" and "the professor"; names would have been simpler and, if well-chosen, more effective identifiers.
In "Dante Alighieri," the final Roman tale, an American-born scholar of Italian literature married to an older Italian doctor reconsiders the three great betrayals she has committed in her life: of her best friend in college, of her husband, and finally, of her own desires suppressed by "false virtue." We learn how she moved away from her husband by degrees — a sort of continental drift — returning to America to teach while keeping an apartment in Rome. During her beloved mother-in-law's funeral, she reflects: "You travel a certain distance, you desire and make decisions, and you're left with recollections, some shimmering and some disturbing, that you'd rather not conjure on. But today, in the basilica, memory dominates, the deepest kind. It waits for you under the rock — bits of yourself, still living and restless, that shudder when you expose them." And she wonders, "How long must we live to learn how to survive?"
It is a question that underscores many of the stories in this affecting collection.
veryGood! (47)
Related
- Rams vs. 49ers highlights: LA wins rainy defensive struggle in key divisional game
- Italy and Libya resume commercial flights after 10-year hiatus, officials say
- Inflation drops to a two-year low in Europe. It offers hope, but higher oil prices loom
- Backers of North Dakota congressional age limits sue over out-of-state petitioner ban
- Current, future North Carolina governor’s challenge of power
- NBA suspends former Spurs guard Joshua Primo for 4 games for exposing himself to women
- Searchers looking for 7 kidnapped youths in Mexico find 6 bodies, 1 wounded survivor
- Israeli soldiers kill a Palestinian man in West Bank, saying he threw explosives
- Which apps offer encrypted messaging? How to switch and what to know after feds’ warning
- Joe Jonas Wrote Letter About U.K. Home Plans With Sophie Turner and Daughters 3 Months Before Divorce
Ranking
- Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow owns a $3 million Batmobile Tumbler
- Almost all of Nagorno-Karabakh’s people have left, Armenia’s government says
- Christopher Worrell, fugitive Proud Boys member and Jan. 6 rioter, captured by FBI
- Republican presidential candidates use TikTok and Taylor Swift to compete for young voters
- The Super Bowl could end in a 'three
- Brian May, best known as Queen's guitarist, helped NASA return its 1st asteroid sample to Earth
- Jessica Campbell, Kori Cheverie breaking barriers for female coaches in NHL
- Europe sweeps USA in Friday morning foursomes at 2023 Ryder Cup
Recommendation
Will the 'Yellowstone' finale be the last episode? What we know about Season 6, spinoffs
Confirmed heat deaths in Arizona’s most populous metro keep rising even as the weather turns cooler
Is New York City sinking? NASA finds metropolitan area slowly submerging
Virginia ex-superintendent convicted of misdemeanor in firing of teacher
Trump suggestion that Egypt, Jordan absorb Palestinians from Gaza draws rejections, confusion
Tennessee woman accused in shooting tells deputies that she thought salesman was a hit man
North Macedonia national park’s rising bear population poses a threat to residents
Panama Canal reduces the maximum number of ships travelling the waterway to 31 per day