Roman Stories
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4.2 • 51 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER, NPR • The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth • Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories
"A delectable, sun-washed treat . . . the stories have the beating heart of the city itself, a place of magnificent decay and vibrant, varied life." —Vogue
In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line.
And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.
These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With these nine stories set in the Eternal City, the stunningly talented Jhumpa Lahiri draws us into the hearts and minds of a varied cast of characters connected by their outsiderness—a vague sense of isolation, loneliness, or detachment that leads them to observe their daily lives with sharpened senses. From a trattoria lunch date soured by two friends’ differing perceptions of a little girl’s rudeness to the wistful memories triggered by a woman’s attendance at her ex-mother-in-law’s funeral, Lahiri captures little inflection points that stir up big emotional storms. Lahiri—who recently returned to the U.S. after living in Rome for over a decade—clearly loves the storied Italian city, but she excavates its romanticized veneer to portray a more complicated reality: a moody, beautiful, and chaotic metropolis grappling with contemporary issues like migration, homelessness, racism, and xenophobia. Roman Stories is the kind of book that sucks you in and leaves you contemplating what you’ve just read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
