In Dante's Footsteps: Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction is filtered through acts of translation, not only in her fluency in Bengali, English, and Italian but also in the cross-cultural flux of experience in her short stories. Both epigraphs to Roman Stories appear in translation: the first, from Livy’s Ab urbe condita, describes the city gaining new ground, “growing this way and that”; the second, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, mentions “the gaping gates of Janus” that “were still unblocked.” With subtlety and clarity, Lahiri’s translations in these nine stories are transformative, each gaining new ground in perception and unblocking cultural barriers.

The first of nine stories, “The Boundary,” is itself divided into nine sections that describe two families, each unnamed character living in an unnamed rural Italian setting. Over the course of a week, the fifteen-year-old narrator observes the family of four on vacation in a house where her father is the caretaker. She translates the boundary between herself and her visitors. “Every Saturday, a new family comes to stay. Some arrive early in the morning, from afar, ready to begin their vacation. Others don’t turn up until sunset, in bad moods, maybe having lost their way. It’s easy to get lost in these hills; the roads are poorly signposted.” Lahiri establishes the weekly routine in measured prose that rhymes like verse: Saturday, stay, way, every .. family. She signposts stylistically through an accumulation of commas that punctuate phrases and clauses, order the decline of Roman sprawl, and translate boundaries. The short story format imposes its own boundary, foreshortening angles of vision and sound in the brevity of enigma and epiphany.

Triads of translation pervade Lahiri’s writing to create a rhythmic order: “They follow me, wide-eyed, happy to stretch their legs.” Her perspective focuses on the boundary between narrow- and wide-eyed vision, between her status as an outsider and the conventions of Roman society. “I pretend not to watch them, to be discreet,” but “The Boundary” is all about the narrator’s watchful eye, for she feels “out of place. I don’t mix easily with others; I don’t look like anyone else.” Out of place, she finds her place on the boundary, observing the visiting mother who writes in a notebook. She filters the surrounding landscape through the eyes of her visitor: “The bleached fence and the low stone wall that marks the property line. She looks at all the things I look at every day. But I wonder what else she sees in them.” Lahiri paints the perspective of the boundary between two observers separated by status, and the boundary of the property line accentuates that distinction.

This visiting mother contrasts with the narrator’s absent mother who “can’t stand this place …. she comes from much farther away.” She complains that the people are “closed off,” although she is closed off from the rest of the Romans. A flashback provides background information for their move to the countryside. In the city, her father sells flowers, but one night he is robbed and beaten up after he binds up a bouquet, creating another boundary between newcomers and insiders.

After the departure of the visiting family, the narrator tidies up the premises: “They’ve forgotten, or left on purpose, a few things they don’t need, things I hold on to.” These fragments of memory point to the evanescence of experience (a prominent feature of the short story genre in the works of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro) — what is purposeful and what is forgotten. Ordinary experience takes on additional meaning in the final sentence: “Shopping lists in the faint, small script that the mother used, on other sheets of paper, to write all about us.” Who writes about whom in these translated lists of boundaries that unblock “the gaping gates of Janus”? Neither the narrator’s family nor the visiting family is at home in “The Boundary,” a short story of liminality presided over by Janus.

Objectification through namelessness and the definite article recurs in the next story, “The Reentry,” where two women — the “woman in mourning” and the professor — exchange stories about their experiences in Rome during lunch at a trattoria. Although most of the story takes place in the trattoria, the beginning and ending focus on a bridge in Rome that frames the internal events. The two women meet on the Ponte Sisto: “They step over the low rusty chain that blocks traffic on the bridge. Lovers affix padlocks to the links; distracted pedestrians tend to trip over them.” While the bridge marks another boundary or liminal space, its chain links are an impediment not only to traffic but also to the characters’ reentry into Roman society. The professor is blocked by her dark features, which identify her as “la moretta” by the padrona of the trattoria. Although the professor enjoys returning to Rome (“It’s the only place where I feel really at home”), she “fears that her relationship with the city is actually quite tenuous.”

When the two women take turns going to the washroom, the sense of being at home is further questioned: the woman in mourning feels at home, whereas the professor is ill at ease. This feeling is exacerbated by a girl seated on the floor with her legs splayed outside the bathroom. The girl refuses to budge when the professor tries to walk past her: “As soon as she’s crossed the small barrier of flesh and blood she hears the girl whisper some sort of complaint.” This internal incident of discrimination and blocking the way corresponds to the bridge at the beginning and end of the story. “They cross the bridge together, stepping over the first chain weighted down with forgotten promises.” The weight of forgotten promises and other obstacles to reentry mar the professor’s experience, marked by her dark features that remain unforgotten. Lahiri inserts telling details that serve as tipping points inside her fiction.

Anonymity carries over to the next story, “P’s Parties,” where an initial from the alphabet serves as the only source of identity. The titular parties occur at the beginning of the new year when Janus gazes on the “impersonal” atmosphere of two distinct groups, “like two opposing currents that crisscross in the ocean, forming a perfectly symmetrical shape, only to cancel each other out a moment later.” Lahiri’s asymmetry focusses on foreigners and Italians through the lens of a male narrator: “They were a nomadic population that piqued my interest — prototypes, perhaps, for one of my future stories.” These parties remain indistinguishable “until one year when something out of the ordinary occurred, an ultimately banal disruption that remains a caesura in my life.” With her caesuras of style Lahiri transforms the banal into the extraordinary, dropping hints along the way, such as the piling of coats on a couch, “an already precarious, promiscuous mound of fabric.” Evanescent and permanent tipping points pervade Roman Stories with characters teetering on a cliff’s edge, caught in the penmanship of a writer-narrator. Lahiri’s stories explore the boundary of bigotry in various walks of life.

“The Steps” occupies the central part of this collection. Divided into six sections, with each section devoted to a different character’s relationship to the 126 steps of the same staircase, the story is a commentary on Rome’s Spanish Steps and the cinematic allure of Fellini. Once again the definite article dominates to objectify “The Mother”: “The mother who climbs the steps first thing in the morning pauses when she’s nearly reached the summit, turns around briefly, and admires the view.” These steps belong to the six stages within this story, as well as the cosmic stages in Dante’s Divine Comedy (which forms the backdrop to the concluding story in the volume). By the end of the story, she descends the steps: “The mother thinks that the steps in this city, though made of stone, are something like the sea, where everything washes back eventually.” Rhyme and rhythm imitate the tide: Lahiri’s Bengali diaspora undulates across the Mediterranean ebb and flow.

This rhythm in “The Steps” continues in the second section, “The Widow,” which overtakes the descent in “The Mother”: “The widow who descends the steps in the late morning is scared of all the broken glass lying everywhere.” Broken glass hints not only at her broken life but also at the city’s fractured condition where foreigners struggle against local prejudice. Furthermore, these fragments point to the mosaic composition of sections within the story. “All of this shattered glass is the by-product of those kids who perch on the steps.” These shards interfere with her daily route and routine in a besieged Rome.

The third section, “The Expat Wife,” carries on this routine:”The expat wife who, at lunchtime, races nimbly up the steps, is scheduled for an operation the following day.” In this measured sestet she climbs 126 steps, divided into six sections of 21, to reach the summit. The third movement of this sestet ends with her preparing for an operation by imagining her past across the ocean: “But then even that image fades, and the expat housewife senses only the sun’s heat striking her back and the thundering cascade of glass bottles as the garbagemen fill up their little truck.” This glass cacophony echoes her earlier experience of a noisy MRI, as well as other sounds of the city. As one image fades, it is picked up by a similar image in the following section, “The Girl.” As the girl goes down the steps, she is surrounded by other girls in a cluster of imagery that reflects the city and the structure of “The Steps”: “They descend together like a … waterfall, a live current.” Lahiri’s shards form prisms that refract the colours of Rome and disperse a Eurocentric spectrum.

“The Screenwriter” closes the series. He lives at the foot of the steps and remembers when he used to work on his typewriter, “its metal tentacles striking the white sheet of paper one by one.” Now he is working on a film set in nineteenth-century Rome about a sixteen-year-old boy who was a drummer for Garibaldi and was killed at the top of the staircase. This historic backdrop adds resonance to the contemporary scene: “At night the steps turn into a kind of ancient amphitheater,” as the spectacle of Rome unfolds, and “the nightly drama lies in their exchanges.” The screenwriter considers filming the nocturnal return of boys disturbing the steps. Lahiri inserts another cluster of images involving the trapping of wasps under glass, “the wasps hovering around inside their cylindrical glass prisons.” Their pattern mirrors the lives of staircase characters: “they’d shuttle up and down, searching for a way out, on their delicate V-shaped wings.” And that V is a reminder of the use of the alphabet to name some characters and other lettered patterns on the typewriter’s tentacles: “He notices the white dots of light from the lampposts, creating a kind of symmetrical constellation around the staircase, like a big, wide letter M.”

As the screenwriter thinks about taking a break at the seaside, the tentacles of the typewriter intrude in the form of an attack by boys who rob him: “He now realizes that the cold, delicate object pressed to his neck is most certainly a shard of glass.” The delicate wings of wasps fuse with the sting of this delicate shard. If the criminal instrument recalls other shards in “The Steps,” then the other image of bottled wasps also recurs as a commentary on fate in Rome: “And with his eyes, for as long as he can, he follows the shapes of the three kids who — like the wasps he’d once so deftly caught and released, to protect his children — dart away and disappear.” The reader follows the shapes of Lahiri’s fiction in the breaking and reentering of Rome.

Similar patterns emerge in “The Delivery” when the female narrator belatedly goes to the post office to pick up a package which has already been returned to the sender. Instead of that delivery, what gets delivered is a pistol shot to her body. The first section ends with her fainting: “Then I feel tremendous pain in my shoulder and I see the sky overhead.” The second section switches abruptly to one of the assailants who has witnessed the shooting, as he offers his own narration of events. This narrator presents his xenophobic view that includes an imperial allusion: “Once it was a quiet neighborhood between the train tracks and an aqueduct built by an emperor, while “They pray barefoot in squalid buildings.” Lahiri’s bifocal balance incorporates both sides of the tracks for victims and their oppressors.

His guilt appears in a series of images that surface at the seaside: “A few twisted-up branches” that parallel his victim’s braided hair and the deformed legs of someone in a wheelchair. “Nothing shiny like the pistol my friend tossed from his motorino into the river. He’d fired twice and she’d fallen to the ground. She had a long dark braid.” Staccato rhythm imitates the delivery: a dark crime against her dark legs, as small details accentuate his guilt. “I feel something bothering me, something at my feet,” where ants proliferate. Umbrellas on the beach are like the hair tie at the bottom of his victim’s braid. “And once they’re closed up and bound tight, they remind me of her long braid too.” Guilt plagues him when he dries himself: “the waves hiss in my ears like snakes.” A serpentine venom accompanies him on the ride back to the city: “A stream of cold air pelts my face on the ride,” as bullets backfire and ricochet.

In the third and final section, the initial narrator recovers in the hospital from her wounds. Convalescing at home, she hears the sounds of kids prowling in the night: “They’re like cats or insects that come out only at night, that meet up and colonize the edges of streets.” At the boundary of streets Lahiri’s peripheral vision captures host and guest communities — colonies and imperial aqueducts in “a joyful kingdom.” Her twofold vision combines light and darkness, victims and victimizers. “I notice a few kids with different features, with darker complexions like mine. A strange harmony binds them together.” This strange harmony of ambiguity recurs at the finale: “I feel a pain in the center of my chest, as if one of those pellets were lodged in my heart, and I nearly die from envy.” In her acts of translation, Lahiri literally and figuratively drives home the ambivalence of homelessness and dual citizenship.

In the penultimate story, “Notes,” the narrator briefly assists at a school where someone mysteriously places unwelcome notes in her pocket. She places these hostile slips of paper in an envelope which invades her life and home: “the strident presence of that envelope tormented me.” At the tailor shop where she works another mysterious event occurs when a fluorescent lightbulb detaches from the ceiling and shatters, covering the spot where she works with “terrifying shards” and white powder. In the end, she swallows the bits of paper and is cured: “those messages disappeared along with the bitter taste in my throat.” Lahiri’s bittersweet messages are mysterious and cathartic.

Past and present oscillate in the final story, “Dante Alighieri,” as the narrator returns to Rome for her mother-in-law’s funeral. Her favourite fountain pen slips: “the tip of the nib struck the marble floor, disrupting the flow of ink, which is why every sentence I’ll write from now on will be accompanied by the stutter of a broken line.” Her broken line examines the church with its “orderly labyrinth of stars and octagons: a multicolored slab full of cavities.”

That kind of architecture characterizes Roman Stories. A divine figure attached to the ceiling looks down: “Her hands are raised, her palms facing toward us. It’s meant to be a benediction, but it also seems as if she’s warding us off.” As the narrator internalizes that symbol, she wonders if she too would gain some perspective from above. That kind of narrative omniscience is accompanied by an Italian sentence, as if bifocal vision and bilingualism went hand in hand.

She studies the works of Dante in translation, then in the original, and is especially interested in his deformed women. She also studies the landscape of trees refracted in a brook: “They were like my life: turned on its head.” Dante’s Manto, with her face turned tragically backwards, merges with the inverted landscape: “I was convinced that I’d reversed my real roots, the original ones, which now seemed like a simulacrum.” Just as Dante in Purgatory looks under boulders, so the narrator prods her own Purgatory. Each story is a simulacrum — a translation of the disposable day-to-day life in Italy and an overseas landscape: “Our deepest memories are like infinite roots reflected in the brook, a simulacrum without end.” Lahiri’s roots are reflected in every short story, which lasts only so long, yet extends beyond itself.

As “Dante Alighieri” winds down, it seems to offer a prescription for its own composition. “These women in the middle of life’s journey are the third family I’ve had.” Through Dante’s dark wood, Lahiri finds her way: “Distances help, as does changing one’s perspective on a regular basis.” She transforms and translates distances, and regularly changes perspectives. She spots a rabbit with its “black marble eye staring out at nothing, or maybe everything.” Between marble eye and marble floor, the author scales and stalks her Italian quarry from nothingness to everything. The animal “emits terror or else it simply mirrors my own.” Her migratory mirror reflects simulacra and multiple surfaces from medieval icons to modern globalism; the glass may also crack and distort. “I’d call the academic side of this two-sided life a sort of purgatory. Rome switches between heaven and hell.”

When she turns again to the female figure on the ceiling, she concludes: “Only words cede, those spoken and delivered by hand, and friendships, and cells, and shoes with leopard spots and Sunday lunches of long ago, and passions in adolescence and in adulthood, and stores that sell knives and small appliances, parental worries, children’s voices, clamshells on the edge of your plate.” This list of plenitude goes on from microscopic cell to commercial sell, to domestic detail and clamshell that carries the sound of the sea. At once random and orderly, the sentence evokes lists from Gallant and Munro. Lahiri’s Alighieri is epic and cosmic, purgatorial and penned with a broken nib that translates a medieval world into modern vision.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Canada (Oct. 10 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1039006345
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1039006348

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.