The perpetual quest for defining elements one can call one's own--an identity, a family, a country--has long been the subject of Jhumpa Lahiri's writing, and that dynamic deepens with her exceptional collection Roman Stories. Written in Italian and translated by Lahiri (Translating Myself and Others; Whereabouts; The Lowland) with Todd Portnowitz, these nine stories, all of them featuring unnamed protagonists, center upon characters who have moved to Italy from elsewhere--more than one refers to "their country"--and who are often in conflict with locals who don't accept them as readily as the protagonists have accepted their adopted land.
Boundaries, whether between peoples or countries, are at the center of each work, sometimes explicitly so, as in "The Boundary," in which a teenager's immigrant family rents out a guest house on the property for which her father is the caretaker, and she wonders what that week's privileged occupants "know about the loneliness here." In "The Reentry," two women, one white and the other darker-skinned, meet for lunch, where the latter is subjected to racist comments that are no less shocking for being coated in sugary words. In "Well-Lit House," an immigrant family is subject to abuse from neighbors when they move to the city's outskirts. "She looks at everything I look at every day," the teenager in "The Boundary" observes. "But I wonder what else she sees in them." The ability to see beyond the obvious is Lahiri's greatest gift, and she demonstrates it again in this marvelous work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer