Rome--metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future,
multi-faceted and metaphysical--is the protagonist, not the setting, of
these nine stories: the first short story collection by the Pulitzer
Prize-winning master of the form since her number one New York Times
best seller Unaccustomed Earth, and a major literary event.
In "The Boundary," one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though
we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker's daughter, who
nurses a wound from her family's immigrant past. In "P's Parties," a
Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with
foreigners at their friend's yearly birthday gathering--until the
husband crosses a line. And in "The Steps," on a public staircase that
connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it,
we see Italy's capital in all of its social and cultural variegations,
filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and
invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling
worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.
These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri's
adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and
by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian
master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the
ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist
toward a new way of life.
