Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri holds no earth-shattering content but helps us imbibe the short story in a unique way. The short story is a genre that is being attempted to be written very differently by several Japanese authors, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret and Jhumpa Lahiri, among some others.
It is now up to us, the readers, to enjoy this simple yet elegant style.
The world has long known that Jhumpa Lahiri is a truly international writer, and it is not just because of her Pulitzer that the Americans love her more than, perhaps, we in India do.
There is nothing traumatic in her stories.
People live, die, have sex and make decisions, just like it is in the ebb and flow of life—a natural progression, be it well lived or not.
They are gentle people, making sense of the little imperfections and, most of all, the impermanence of it all. They just pick up the pieces and move on.sura Her stories reveal in gentle epiphanies, that no matter how bitter the truth is, they never turn toxic into that indigestible bile or into that sledgehammer impact.
“Every desire is a decision,” one of her characters says in the last story called Dante Alighieri in a collection of stories set in Rome, though the writer keeps the names of people and places anonymous.
This is another major deviation in the short story format, though it is not totally new.
The title of the book is from Alberto Moravia’s volume of work, Racconti Romani— Roman Stories.
The allegories here are nuanced: Rome is a place that is between heaven and hell. The author’s core is a worldview that is more eastern than western, even though her characters are multicultural and live in the western world.
Since the scope of that multi-cultural world is only expanding as is to be expected in a global world, she applies her own inside-outside immigrant views on a broader canvas this time. At the same time, she makes a case against xenophobia versus identity in countries, where immigrants are pouring in from erstwhile colonies and other poorer countries. Is this multicultural world all that multicultural, after all? In this book, the author’s own world shifts from the USA, where Lahiri is a second-generation immigrant to Italy, where she chooses to live with her family and puts her proficiency in the Italian language to the test.
Lahiri aptly does this in very exquisite tones, almost in whispers, which has become her forte. Though the stories are her own translations of her original work in Italian, just like her previous short novel, Whereabouts (Dove Mi Trovo) was about a professor, a female protagonist, who negotiates her life in what is presumably Rome.
Lahiri does not state the politics, but the hints are there for us to recognise. What one writes in Ivy School admission essays about plurality and diversity to get into the expensive colleges by outsiders is often turned on its head when one starts living as the immigrant. And it is left to fiction writers to capture these ironies, and who better than Lahiri to capture the same? She once told TIME magazine that this inside, outside identity she has had all her life “becomes an interior dialogue between you and another part of you.”
She added in a television interview that translating also helps one to write better. And as far as this book is concerned, nothing is lost in translation.
The author is a senior journalist who studied Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University.