ROMAN STORIES by JHUMPA LAHIRI Review

“I will always feel like an outsider wherever I am,” Jhumpa Lahiri told HBR in 2022. This sentiment is clear in her early work, including Interpreter of Maladies (which won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 2000) and The Namesake, both stories of Indian diaspora and immigrant experiences across the world. In the 2010s, Lahiri made two moves—one, physically, by relocating to Rome; the other was a surprising decision to move from writing in English to writing almost exclusively in Italian. Roman Stories is her fourth book written in Italian, following two nonfiction essay collections, In Other Words and Translating Myself and Others, and a novel, Whereabouts. It is, in some ways, the culmination of all these years of work—a short story collection that recalls the effect and preoccupations of Lahiri’s earliest work, and a crystallization of her ever-growing experience living, and writing, as an outsider.

Language is a fascinating element of Roman Stories, which Lahiri wrote in her new language, Italian, and then brought into English mostly herself (two stories were translated by Todd Portnowitz)—two languages in which she perhaps feels equally at ease, or perhaps equally an outsider. Roman Stories recalls Interpreter of Maladies in its clear, crisp prose and attention to detail, full of careful observations from daily lives. A character returns to her flat after some time away and opens all the windows; “There’s always need for a small exorcism”, she thinks. A man on holiday notices the people in the windows of houses: “They just seem so small in those windows, each of them fixed in their own dark square.” In these stories, we see the themes that are present across her work: an interest in the everyday relationships between people and place, and between people and people.

Roman Stories draws inspiration from Racconti romani, or Roman Tales, a 1954 short story collection by Alberto Moravia. Both books feature a wide range of Rome’s inhabitants, who mostly remain nameless. Roman Tales is told primarily from the perspective of the common person—the “average” Roman—and Roman Stories uses the same idea, introducing us to characters across class, age, and circumstance. In these pages, there are the wealthy middle- and upper-class who travel to holiday homes and attend big parties; there are also caretakers, tailors, school-going children, and big families. Some are born in Rome, some are from other parts of Italy, some are expats and immigrants from other countries; some are lifelong inhabitants, and others are on holiday.

Lahiri’s characters are from varied walks of life, with different circumstances to mark them, and different ways to move through the world. They are connected by the city they’re in. But interestingly, Rome seems to take a backseat in these stories. It is still the setting for these characters’ lives, but Lahiri is not so concerned with painting a picture of the city and its landscape as a whole. More important is how her characters relate to the city. We see it primarily in daily lives—in visits to restaurants, in the houses where parties are thrown, in the homes where people live their days. A character says, of Rome, “It’s the only place where I really feel at home.” But once she’s said that, she wonders: is her relationship with the city more tenuous than she thinks? She wasn’t born here; she doesn’t have a familial connection to the streets and restaurants. In Roman Stories, it is this feeling—the feeling of not belonging—that is the most stark throughline of the collection.

The axes on which “belonging” and “not-belonging” are determined aren’t limited—class, language, country of birth, and skin color are all equal reasons for feeling, and being perceived, as an outsider. And this has physical manifestations: Roman Stories’ characters face discrimination ranging from uncomfortable microaggressions to all-out assault. There’s a sense that no one is safe from this, no matter their location within Roman society (although some have it worse than others). In “The Reentry”, a successful professor with “darker hair and darker skin” than her friend feels “ill at ease” by needling comments from a trattoria’s staff. In the short, moving “Notes”, a woman receives anonymous notes with messages like “We don’t like your face”. There are acts of violence—assaults by grown men, by children, by communities, spurred by hatred, or dislike, or fear of the outsider. We glimpse a city that is vivid, full of history and beauty, but the one we see in these pages appears constantly closed-off to those it mistrusts. And isn’t that true of most cities?

Lahiri never uses identifying geographies, religions, or ethnicities to locate her characters, replacing words like “immigrant” with “foreigner”, referring to skin color to mark her characters from each other. In one of the collection’s most affecting stories, “Well-Lit House”, a family is driven out of their home by their angry neighbors. Their geographical/political/religious identities are only obliquely referred to, with a home country left unnamed, and mentions of the protagonist’s wife’s veil as “the only way she felt comfortable going out”. Lahiri manages to drive home a double point with this technique. She makes it clear that these markers of identity are a definite reason for overtly racist and discriminatory behavior, a kind that always feels like it could tip over into outright violence. But by refusing to anchor the story with specific names—of people, places—she also makes sure we don’t bring our preconceived notions, negative or not, to these characters.

The centerpiece of the collection is the story “The Steps”, which shows us a Rome in miniature on the steps of a neighborhood. “The Steps” is also like Roman Stories in miniature, emblematic of the themes and ideas that Lahiri seems most interested in—foreignness, relationships, daily life, a violence that is simultaneously ordinary and unexpected. We meet six characters that traverse the steps on their daily commute, or who use it as a place to rest—schoolchildren and daily-wage workers, foreigners and locals, friendly faces and more reticent ones. The sections are vignette-like, a glimpse into different lives, but each revealing a different way to engage with the city they live in. In the section about an expat wife, there is an evocative description of living amongst a foreign language, one that recalls Lahiri’s stories of her own experiences in In Other Words: “...the shopkeepers talk to her anyway, telling her meandering stories she struggles to follow. Sometimes all those words cause her to lose her balance, to the point where she’ll look around for something to lean on.”

The slice-of-life stories in Roman Stories, like “The Reentry”, might seem, at first glance, less impactful than bigger-idea stories such as “Well-Lit House”. But the collection’s success is in its focus on the everyday, whether it’s on a daily kind of violence or a daily kind of beauty. In the first story, “The Boundary”, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a caretaker watches a family move into a holiday home. The mother spends her days in a lounge chair, writing in a little notebook, and looking carefully at the landscape that surrounds her. The girl thinks: “She looks at all the things I look at every day. But I wonder what else she sees in them.” In Roman Stories, Lahiri shows us.

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.