The Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection is an urgent and affecting portrait of Rome in nine stories featuring characters, both native and non-native, who inhabit the city without ever feeling fully at home. As one remarks, “Rome switches between heaven and hell.”
Like Whereabouts, Lahiri’s previous book, this collection was composed in Italian and then translated into English. Lahiri self-translated six out of the nine stories, entrusting editor Todd Portnowitz with the remaining three. The translation is supple and elegant throughout; sentences gleam and flow, adding to the vividness and immediacy of these tales about buried grief, belonging and unbelonging, the meaning of home and the cost of exile.
