IT'S NO ROMAN HOLIDAY

Jhumpa Lahiri reckons with her heritage in her new book, where characters share their unease about present-day Rome

- Somak Ghoshal

Jhumpa Lahiri's new book, Roman Stories, is prefaced by two epigraphs, from Livy and Ovid, the great chroniclers of ancient Rome, respectively. While the lines from Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, his magisterial history of Rome, capture the restless spirit of the city, "growing this way and that", the quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses alludes to the "gaping gates of Janus" being "still unblocked". These gates, as antiquity records, were opened when Rome was at war, and closed during times of peace.

In Lahiri's stories, written in Italian and translated into English by her, along with Todd Portnowitz, we witness contemporary Rome as a fast-expanding metropolis, engaged in a civil war of sorts. Lahiri's vignettes are beautifully concise, observed with tender affection, but also with a sense of liminal dread. Characters step in and out of the pages, nebulously linked, never explicitly named, or placed, except through fleeting references to their habits, clothes, histories and appearances. Some are identified by generic markers-"The Mother", "The Widow", "The Expat Wife", "The Girl", "The Brothers", "The Screenwriter"though never dehumanised. Lahiri conjures up their private worlds, hopes, dreams and heartbreaks with clinical precision. These sketches feel like a nod to Italo Calvino, a master of modern Italian fiction, whom Lahiri has translated into English.