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.
The characters, always unnamed, are sick and homesick; they worry about their bodies and they reminisce about past homes and past lives. Sometimes a parent, a friend or a child is remembered or mourned; always, a degree of guilt is involved. In The Procession, set during the festivities of La Festa de Noantri, a couple arrive in Rome to celebrate the wife’s 50th birthday. The city, we learn, holds a special place in her heart; it was where she had studied for a year when she was 19 and where she had fallen in love for the first time. But peace will repeatedly elude her during her stay. Upsetting details accumulate. Morning light that startles “like an electric charge”; a chandelier that threatens to come crashing down. French doors that slam and shatter. A room that will not unlock. Another that brings to mind an operating theatre and a dead son.
Lahiri writes with fond and deliberate beauty about Rome. The city’s “splendour”, however, is “under siege” and “in decline”. Walls and street signs, she tells us, are graffitied with xenophobic slurs. Landmarks are stalked by thugs, and are littered with trash and broken glass. Outsiders – those with the wrong accent, history, skin colour or sartorial habits – are treated with disdain and suspicion and are parsed through a frigid vocabulary of difference; they are “strangers”, “foreigners”, “people who spoke other languages”, people with uncommon “facial features”, people from other countries, other continents. It is to them that Lahiri devotes many of these stories.
In The Boundary, a girl and her family have relocated to a hilly countryside outside Rome after her immigrant father was the victim of a racist attack in the city. She takes a keen interest in a group of holidaymakers in the house next door; it is, we come to see, her way of dealing with loneliness and a father for ever changed by trauma. “He garbles his words, as if he were an old man,” the girl says. “He’s ashamed to smile, because of his missing teeth. My mother and I understand him, but others don’t. They think, since he’s a foreigner, that he doesn’t speak the language. Sometimes they even think he’s mute.”
In The Delivery, a young woman of colour walks back from collecting a package from the post office on behalf of her employer, and is shot point-blank by a man on a scooter (“Go wash those dirty legs,” he yells at her before zipping away). The words “dirty” and “ugly” bristle with racist overtones in Notes and The Reentry respectively, two stories that spotlight the cruelty of young children and the indifference of insensitive adults.
Well-Lit House shows a war refugee trying to hold his own in the face of concerted hostility from his neighbours. By the end of the story, he and his family have been driven out of their apartment. He finds himself sleeping rough on the streets and his wife returns to their country of birth with their children.
Lahiri has never been particularly political as a writer. “I’m trying to create people of all kinds and put them into situations, and it’s not my objective to have a message,” she once said in an interview. Yet across the pages of this book one senses the quiet fury of an author who, appalled and disheartened by the situation of immigrants in Italy, finally seems to have wed her pen and her politics. The anti-immigrant rhetoric of Italy’s far right, nativist zealotry, the sunken dinghies in the Mediterranean, the casual, everyday Islamophobia and Afrophobia of Italians: it’s all here, captured with jagged, unflinching honesty.
Readers who are familiar with Lahiri’s previous two collections, Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies, will find many of her habitual concerns: with place, identity, alienation and otherness. They will sense, too, something else: a deepening and furthering of these same concerns in the form of situations and scenarios that allow very little in the way of light. In Dante Alighieri, the narrator, a fiftysomething looking back on her life, tells us: “Certain stories are hard to bear, as are certain things we’ve lived or observed or fumbled or explored with great care.” I can think of no better way to describe the stories collected here. They bear, much like life, the painful bite of the real.
• Roman Stories byJhumpa Lahiri, translated by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz, is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
