Roman Stories

May 1, 2023

Writing in Italian, her adopted language, the Pulitzer Prize--winning Lahiri offers nine stories steeped in Rome's sights, sounds, and scents in her first collection since 2008's Unaccustomed Earth, taking readers from a staircase uniting two neighborhoods to the surrounding countryside. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2023
A brilliant return to the short story form by an author of protean accomplishments. Lahiri's third collection follows her Pulitzer-winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), with novels and essays interspersed. In 2011, she moved from the U.S. to Rome, where she has become a prolific translator and editor in Italian, and like its immediate predecessor, the novel Whereabouts (2021), the stories in this book were written in Italian then translated to English. As a group, they evoke her new city from the perspective of an outsider looking in--sometimes one character peering into the life of another, or characters staying in houses that belong to other people. The first story, "The Boundary," establishes this theme, narrated by a girl whose family rents out a guesthouse on their property--she watches the renters, listens to them, and draws conclusions about them, and it later turns out they're watching right back. In the moving and wonderfully economical "The Procession," a couple cannot get settled in the apartment they've rented, the wife particularly agitated by a locked room and a dangerous-looking chandelier. In "Well-Lit House," an immigrant couple with five children is hounded from their home by bigots; the wife and kids return to their country, and the man wanders the city, homeless. Dark-skinned people in numerous stories are tormented by random acts of cruelty, in several cases by children. The central story of the book, "The Steps," is like the game of picking out passersby and imagining what lives they have. Seven characters are seen on an ancient staircase of 126 travertine steps in the middle of town, and each is presented in their own story: the mother, the widow, the expat wife, the girl, two brothers (who share a section), the screenwriter. In the last story, "Dante Alighieri," a woman at her mother-in-law's funeral reflects on the long-ago loss of a friend, a memory that connects to other losses and distances. "Our deepest memories are like infinite roots reflected in the brook, a simulacrum without end." She comforts herself by going for pizza with a group of women friends, one of whom utters the book's perfect last line: "This city is shit....But so damn beautiful." Filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect.

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Starred review from August 14, 2023
Lahiri (Whereabouts) delivers a dazzling collection of nine stories originally written in Italian and featuring characters who grapple with vast emotional and social chasms that cleave the lives of families, longtime friends, and immigrants. In “The Reentry,” two friends, an Italian woman in mourning for her father and a visiting professor, meet at a trattoria where the woman downplays the racially tinged slights her dark-skinned friend endures from the owners, forever altering the friendship. “The Steps” paints a tableau of contemporary Rome centered on a staircase that functions as the beating heart of a neighborhood—a mother ascends the stairway on her way to a job minding someone else’s children while thinking about the 13-year-old son she left in another country; later, a teenage child of immigrants imagines for an instant she is one of the girls in miniskirts who congregate on the steps to smoke cigarettes. Throughout, Lahiri’s luminous prose captures a side of Rome often ignored: “Empty plastic cups on their sides sway from right to left like the bright beam of a lighthouse that flashes methodically over black water.” These unembroidered yet potent stories shine.

September 1, 2023
Lahiri returns to the short story with a finely calibrated collection about insiders and outsiders, natives and foreigners. As with her last novel, Whereabouts (2021), Lahiri wrote these in Italian, then translated them into English along with her editor, Todd Portnowitz. The result is prose that feels rinsed, wrung, and sun-cured like the clothes on the line in "The Boundary," narrated by the keenly observant 15-year-old daughter of a caretaker from a faraway place whose succinct comparisons of her family's humble existence with the lavish property they tend to speak volumes. This is the mode for each tale: direct, concrete language with few proper names broadcasting complex emotions instigated by subtle social bias or outright racism. Two women meet for lunch; the native Roman is treated with kindness; the darker-skinned professor is subjected to harshness. A Muslim refugee finally secures a sanctuary for his family of six in a small apartment, only to be forced out by hostile neighbors. "The Steps," a suite of stunning stories set on that Roman landmark, portrays people who find themselves rising and falling, including a mother taking care of a local family's children while her son lives back her in tropical homeland with his grandparents. Rome with its echoing past and mercurial present is a potently evocative setting for Lahiri's exquisitely incisive, richly empathetic, and profoundly resonant stories.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lahiri's first book of short stories since Unaccustomed Earth (2009) will be on many must-read lists.

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Starred review from October 6, 2023

Here, Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri offers a powerhouse collection of nine stories in three parts, originally written in Italian and translated by the author, with three exceptions, into English. This is a most impressive assemblage of stories that vary in length and start off quietly, perhaps sadly even, often providing wild twists and turns by each conclusion. In one, a married couple attends annual parties where the husband encounters a woman he cannot stop thinking about until he takes things too far, nearly ruining bonds both familial and friendly. In another, a mother, a widow, a wife, a girl, two brothers, and a screenwriter lead separate lives but share a single, uneven set of stairs. 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. VERDICT Impressive and worthwhile.--Joel D. Shoemaker

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