The Brooklyn Rail

In “Dante Alighieri,” the last story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest short story collection, Roman Stories, she writes: “Every desire becomes a decision.” This feels like the propelling sentiment behind much of Lahiri’s recent work, which since Dove mi trovo (Guanda, 2018), has been written in Italian. Lahiri’s desire to immerse herself in Italian has also become a decision to think about language and how we inhabit it and belong to it. Her choice to become an exophonic writer has only made Lahiri, already restrained and elegant and boundless all at once, even more so. In Roman Stories, Lahiri’s characters—all living in Rome—reckon with what it means to make a place, and a language, home.

Here, Lahiri builds on her exacting, minimalistic prose that characterizes her English language work as a means to explore language itself—as she and her characters theorize what it means to belong to a language, to belong to the geography that shapes and makes a language. Lahiri’s third short story collection, after Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2009), Roman Stories simultaneously delivers precision and abundance in lyric short stories that all meditate on how we build our geographies through language. These nine stories about different narrators who are never named, and who differ greatly in the circumstances of their lives, all explore ultimately what it means to make a home in Rome, to shape and be shaped by the landscapes of the city.

In “The Boundary,” the narrator, the child of immigrants who are caretakers for a house, observes a family who visits, cataloging their presence, reflecting on class, immigration, and what it means to tend to a geography, while also considering her own family, marked by silence. “I realize how much the guests like this rural, unchanging landscape, how much they appreciate every detail, how these things help them think, rest, dream,” the narrator notes, reflecting on the ways that class mediates the relationship the guests have to the landscape. The guests leave eventually, and the narrator’s life continues.

In “The Reentry,” two women—one who was born and raised in Rome and the other an immigrant—meet for lunch. Like in nearly every other story in this collection, they lack names, marked instead by descriptors; Lahiri refers to them as “the woman in mourning” and “the university professor” respectively. In the wake of loss for “the woman in mourning,” born and raised in Rome, her experience of the city is profoundly changed. The university professor, an immigrant to Rome, must also reckon with how her relationship to the city exists, reflection mediated in part by the consciousness of her friend’s deeply rooted familial ties to the city. Having both returned to Rome after time away, for differing reasons, they must examine their newfound relationships to the landscapes of the city and reckon with the way the city archives memory.

In “P’s Parties”, the narrator and his wife are the “type of people for whom just moving to a new neighborhood in their thirties—going to a new pharmacy, buying the newspaper from a different newsstand, finding a table at a different coffee bar—was the equivalent of departure, displacement, complete rupture.” Every year they attend parties hosted by their friend P, and one year remains distinct for the narrator because of what it changes in his relationship to Rome. Their son has left home, recently having graduated college. At one of P’s parties, a child has a shock—an unusual disruption to P’s parties—and the narrator becomes intrigued by the mother of the child, eventually seeing his own relationship to parenting, to the city, and to his wife, anew. “We were, all of us, each on our own, replaying our previous lives: lives still in progress, foolish, makeshift, splendid lives,” reflects the narrator, eventually coming to terms with the inevitability of his son leaving home, and of the way his life has unraveled since P’s party.

In “Dante Alighieri,” Lahiri writes of a friendship between two adolescent girls as they grapple with questions of desire and romantic intimacy. The narrator and her friend’s boyfriend begin a secret romance marked by him handing her an envelope signed pseudonymously as Dante Alighieri. Lahiri writes from the point of view of the narrator, years later, as a middle-aged woman, looking back on that sacred friendship of girlhood becoming marked by betrayal, who now lives between two continents—as she says, “it’s feasible, or at least that’s what I tell myself, even though the preposition makes it sound like eternal limbo.” The narrator, having decided to devote herself to studying Alighieri after that formative relationship and betrayal of her youth, grapples with the real Alighieri shaped by her first encounter with the pseudonym. Here, Lahiri engages with what a national literature means through a canonical writer in an exophonic language, aware always that she is mediated differently in Italian than in English.

These stories are quiet, thinking deeply about our relationships to landscape, and how often these relationships are reconciled through language. Within the ambiguity of solely using common nouns, Lahiri creates a vocabulary of specificity, again highlighting the tensions of abundance and economy that shape her Italian work and Roman Stories in particular. Roman Stories is a testament to Lahiri’s commitment to thinking through what it means to belong to a language; the characters in these stories are all immigrants, all with complicated, shaky, tenuous relationships to home, but in Lahiri’s Italian, they all find home. In these stories, Lahiri grapples with the fluid relationships we share with home, when home is between places, between languages. In “Dante Alighieri,” the narrator says: “Rome is heaven and hell.” Roman Stories is a testament to that statement, documenting the love and loss intertwined in these characters’ relationships to Rome, and is ultimately a catalog and a map of Rome and all it carries, for both Lahiri and her characters.