- This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a collection of short stories set mostly in Rome. Her last book in 2021 was a novel, Whereabouts, also set in Rome. I reviewed it very positively here. The two have a distinct flavour. Lahiri is a chronicler of the everyday.
- In Roman Stories she focuses on marriages, children, daily incidents, families, food, immigrants, and inevitably, racism. Gently and suggestively she infuses meaning into the mundane. There are lots of reflections on life and its vicissitudes. The perspective is often from middle aged women. They know stuff.
- An element I found frustrating at first was her refusal to locate. Nations, races, individuals, cities, suburbs, and towns are all unnamed. People are ‘…from another continent’, a character liked ‘…music from my country’. The closest she gets to naming individuals are giving them initials like P, F, or S. This of course helps to universalise her essential focus, but I'm not sure it works. Irritating a reader is hardly wise.
- There's quite a bit of death and racial abuse in the stories, and many of the characters have very low level, service industry jobs, again branding them as immigrants. There are also authors and academics, but interestingly, these people are usually Westerners, from Italy or 'across the Atlantic', presumably the US.
-Some of the stories, or parts of longer stories, are powerful and beautiful. Others immerse us in ugly realism. Rebellious teenagers, for example, roam around at night and leave smashed bottles on steps, shoot pellets, assault strangers on streets and rob them. The 'steps' I think are the Spanish Steps, a place of majesty, ancient history and beauty.
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