Melancholy yet electric ... The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Stories from a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole. By putting many kinds of foreignness together, Lahiri shows that they all belong.
Written with a sort of elegant simplicity that hits deeper than you realize ... The stories stick with you for a long time, so I’d advise readers to savor each one. Intentionally or not, Lahiri has left a lot of room for us to ruminate, reflect, pause, backtrack. The city of her mind is a very comfortable world to inhabit.
Artfully explore[s] themes of belonging, displacement, acceptance and intolerance ... This is a masterful collection in which Lahiri brilliantly delineates her characters' triumphs and trials.
Readers who have missed the compelling narratives that Jhumpa Lahiri wrote in English before her switch to Italian in 2015 will be happy to learn that Roman Stories is a return to form ... Lahiri shifts her attention in several of these nine stories from well-to-do expats and native Romans to new refugees and immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in a cruelly unwelcoming society ... Heartrending ... An affecting collection.
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 ... Simultaneously delivers precision and abundance in lyric short stories that all meditate on how we build our geographies through language ... 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 ... 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.
Beyond these carefully detailed stories, marked by Lahiri’s stylistic containment, throbs a more menacing story ... A unifying concern across these stories is the fraught and complicated experience of foreigners in Rome that hangs overwhelmingly upon financial and immigration status ... Lahiri knows these parallel tragedies will one day collide, but unfortunately, in these tales, they do not. May her future work thrust her characters into more direct conflict with one another, emerging with hard-earned joy or an anguish equal to the city they call home.
Each narrative contains deftly drawn vignettes of the entwined lives of Italians and foreigners of different classes, colors, ages and creeds. Her characters seek purchase on Rome’s stone streets, bridges, piazzas and walls ... The stones of Ms. Lahiri’s Rome may resist roots, but they shape lives.
The reader isn't truly in Rome because the author herself isn't. Instead, she's searching for ways to belong. Offering her first book written in Italian is one solution. Each of these vignettes offers others. Roman Stories is more of an interior journey than a touristic travelogue
Restrained ... We are left with a sense of Lahiri working over her important themes (exile, migration, rootlessness) with a precise and controlling intellect that at times threatens to overwhelm the emotional engagement required for a short story to fully explode in the heart. Nevertheless, these stories are stimulating, elegant, distinctive and thought-provoking — and those are valuable traits in any language.
Urgent and affecting ... 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 ... 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.
Lahiri published Whereabouts, a short Italian novel that she translated into English herself, in 2021. But Roman Stories — six stories translated by Lahiri, three by Todd Portnowitz, all set in or close to Rome — is longer and more ambitious. The novel was a character study of a solitary woman in an unnamed Italian city, whereas the nine stories in this new collection add up to a vivid portrait of a capital full of splendor — even if, as one character observes, 'it’s a splendor under siege and always in decline' ... Overall, the sense you get from these nine stories is that, while partners, friends and even children come and go, places endure. Rome, in spite of its ruins and aura of perpetual fading, is a constant — at least for the luckier characters.
I found Lahiri’s deeply-embedded sense of liminality present throughout this book — the houses are on the outskirts of the city, women return to Rome to relive old memories, the men sit on the outdoor tables at trattorias. The essence of Roman Stories is a dark cloud that belongs as much to the ground below as it does to the uncharted territory of the sky ... The stories often feel long-wound and unrewarding, but even non-Lahiri lovers will concur that the third section delivers. The four stories here offer the gut-punch reminiscent of her Pulitzer-winning debut book of shorts, Interpreter of Maladies, that with its silver cocktail dress pooled on the closet floor and Mr. Pirzada, the botany professor from Dhaka, carving a pumpkin. The last story, 'Dante Alighieri' is a stunning meditation on the passage of time, and the graceful acceptance of fate. Incipit Vita Nova — Latin for 'And so begins a new life' — is the message in its denouement. Profound for a city so proud of its ageing churches and wrinkled faces. This story, this dull golden knife through our chest, is what we have always loved Jhumpa Lahiri for.
The perpetual quest for defining elements one can call one's own--an identity, a family, a country--has long been the subject of Jhumpa Lahiri's writing, and that dynamic deepens with her exceptional collection Roman Stories ... The ability to see beyond the obvious is Lahiri's greatest gift, and she demonstrates it again in this marvelous work.
A powerhouse collection ... Lahiri’s style is unique, providing enumerations throughout many of the entries, allowing even the longest to read with little investment of time. On the contrary, even the shortest of the thought-provoking stories packs quite an intellectual and emotional wallop ... Impressive and worthwhile.
Finely calibrated ... Rome with its echoing past and mercurial present is a potently evocative setting for Lahiri’s exquisitely incisive, richly empathetic, and profoundly resonant stories.