Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
Roman Stories is a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, woven around the themes of displacement, being an outsider looking in, and constantly straddling two worlds. You might think that since these are a constant in Lahiri’s work, these subjects would feel worn and tired. You would be wrong. In fact, with daily flows of migrants escaping conflict and bleak futures, these topics have never seemed more urgent.
None of the characters are named nor their countries of origin revealed, but through Lahiri’s deft writing, you
can tell who enjoys certain privileges accorded to them by their skin colour and who feels almost as unsafe in their country of supposed refuge as they did in their native lands.
The first story is The Boundary, centered on a young girl who tells us about her family and their life in the middle of nowhere Italy. The simple and straightforward language of a child casually describing a life-changing event has a powerful effect and encapsulates the style and mood of this collection,. Each story is written in deceptively simple language, which often surprised me by the emotional weight they carried. The beauty of the language is punctured by the random acts of violence, which erupt seemingly out of nowhere, but which the astute reader recognises is like lava roiling beneath the surface, which one day has to escape.
The last story Dante Alighieri, seems to pull all the strands of the individual stories together: Some of us are destined to hover between two worlds in perpetuity in a ghost-like existence, never fulling inhabiting either; Tragedy is never too far away from most of us, although it looks different for each person; and – most unnervingly – life rarely turns out the way you expect.
I read this collection quickly, but I could just as well have dined on it for weeks or months. Such is the magic of Jhumpa Lahiri.
I received the ARC from NetGalley to review.
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