Roman Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri, Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz
Vintage: 2024
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If you’re making the sort of remarkable literary pivot that Jhumpa Lahiri has at this point in her writing career, there are some things you’ve necessarily had to discard. A saturation of detail, often striking in her earlier works, has been replaced in her latest short story collection, Roman Stories, by a sparseness of words and lucidity of thought that have allowed Lahiri’s writing to take on the tenor of ephemerality. Then there’s language, most obviously; moving to Italy with her family over a decade ago, Lahiri abandoned English and dived into her passion for Italian, writing short stories, essays, translations, poetry, a memoir of sorts and even a novel entirely in her newly adopted language, in a sort of literary and linguistic departure rarely witnessed in modern literature.

• Tags: India, Issue 36, Jhumpa Lahiri, Siddharth Dasgupta