BookBrowse Reviews Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri returns to her trademark character-driven short stories with the collection Roman Stories, originally written in her adopted language of Italian. In a series of nine stories, divided into three parts, she narrates the lives of Roman denizens. Perhaps informed by her own experience living in Rome, she often takes the perspective of the outsider: immigrant, expatriate, tourist. Through their eyes and their lives, she paints a picture of a city that "is shit…but so damn beautiful." In addition to newcomers, who in their own countries "knew how to run [their lives…but] these days, in this country…can barely manage a thing," she sometimes inhabits lifelong Romans, for whom "going to a new pharmacy, buying the newspaper from a different newsstand, finding a table at a different coffee bar – was the equivalent of departure, displacement, complete rupture." ...