Book Report: Roman Stories

20. Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories (2023) (12/31/24)

I finished this on New Year's Eve, the last of my books for 2024. I read it because it's assigned for a writing workshop I'll be participating in starting on Monday. It's a quiet book of short stories, originally written in Italian by Lahiri, who moved to Italy in 2012, and three years later stopped writing in English and devoted herself strictly to Italian. She translated many of these nine stories herself, though a couple were translated by her editor at Knopf, with fine-tuning by Lahiri. You may recognize her name from the Pulitzer Prize–winning Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Each of the stories is, presumably, set in or around Rome (specific details would no doubt give a reader familiar with Rome a greater sense of this), and each explores the existence of someone who is somehow an outsider—whether to Rome or Italy proper, as Lahiri is, or to some aspect of the social life of the place. All together, the stories explore the challenge of straddling a boundary, and the meaning of home.

Most of the stories are understated, with a shallow plane of rising action, though the climax—the moment of self-discovery—is often profound enough to have stuck in my head. One story, "The Steps," gives us six different characters, all of whom live along or daily use a staircase linking two different neighborhoods in Rome. There's the mother, the widow, the expat wife, the girl, two brothers, and a screenwriter. Some of them grapple with a present-day difficulty, some remember back to earlier times. Near the end of the "Screenwriter" section, we find him thinking,

Tomorrow morning he'll take the train to join his second family [who've decamped to the seaside for August]. His wife will come pick him up at the station in their car and he'll be overjoyed to see her. At forty-two, she still looks like one of the girls worthy of sitting on the staircase in the evening. They'll take a walk along the shore, toward a tower on a promontory, and say hello to various friends (and maybe a few of his wife's ex-boyfriends) on the beach. And he'll think, with a certain melancholy, when he watches the water clamber up the shore, that every effort, and even every pleasure in life, every goal that's reached and achieved, every  recollection, lasts only for an instant, just like the water that throws itself onto the beach, leaving a spontaneous imprint whose wavering contours, like the line drawn by a heart monitor, are never quite the same.

This same quality of melancholy and of living more in memories or imaginings than in the moment shades many of the stories. They contain usually sobering epiphanies, where the characters shed some false hope or recognize some suppressed truth. The cover photo is appropriate, suggesting that although we all live together, we are at the same time separate from one another, that true connection may often be illusory, wishful. By the same token, however, we all somehow belong together in this sometimes confusing life, and connection can happen in the strangest and most satisfying ways. It's a lovely book.