I have long appreciated Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing. I first came across it by accident. I was living in Greece, where my then-wife and I were raising our family; I often browsed for books at the library of the elite high school where my oldest son had obtained a scholarship. One of the librarians approached me, put a volume in my hands, and said, “You’re going to like this.” It was Lahiri’s Pulitzer-prize winning first collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies. And indeed I did like it very much. Later my oldest son got a scholarship to Princeton, and while I was visiting him there we went to see the movie The Namesake, which is adapted from Lahiri’s first novel of the same name; it remains one of my all-time favorite movies. I read the novel when I got back to Greece, and after that I eagerly obtained Lahiri’s books as soon as they were published: the story collection Unaccustomed Earth and the novel The Lowlands.

Lahiri is a brilliant writer, but her works resonated with me on another level too. I lived in Bangladesh for six years; I got married there, and our first two sons were born there. I also spent extensive time in West Bengal at Kolkata and at Santiniketan, the site of Rabindranath Tagore’s ashram and experimental school. For a short time I even studied the Bengali language (on a very basic level) at Dhaka University. Lahiri’s first several books deal with the juxtaposition of Bengali and American cultures, of American Bengalis in India or of immigrant Bengalis in America. Lahiri brilliantly captures the conflicts of cultural adaptation, and she does this by tracing seemingly ordinary events in the lives of individuals and families who are in the midst of difficult periods of change.

As I mentioned above, for me the publication of a new book by Lahiri has always been a cause for celebration. This happens infrequently, though, because Lahiri is not a prolific writer. This was further complicated when she moved to Rome in 2012 and in 2015 she ceased writing in English and began writing only in Italian. At first I couldn’t understand why such an accomplished storyteller would switch from English, a language in which she had obtained a rare level of mastery, to Italian, a language in which she had to start from scratch. In fact, she first wrote Roman Stories and other recent works in Italian and then afterwards translated them into English. I even wondered why, if she wanted to write in another language, she didn’t choose Bengali, which would befit her background. But then again, I am all for freedom of expression, and these are her decisions to make, so I am fine with evaluating her works within the parameters of her decisions.

I can also understand her attraction to Italy and to the region around Rome. I lived for several years in Italy; one of my sons was born there as well. I have traveled throughout much of the country. I learned to speak Italian too, although I haven’t practiced it for decades. It is a vibrant, emotional, expressive language, and Italy is a beautiful, complex country with obvious evidence of its deep historical roots everywhere you go. As for Rome, the setting for the stories in this new collection, it is a fascinating, intricate, sophisticated, and enigmatic city that would richly reward a lifetime of exploration.

(To be continued.)