Like the stories in Lahiri’s earlier collections Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, several of the tales in Roman Stories deal with cultural clashes: affluent foreigners who have chosen for various reasons to relocate to Rome, or laborers and domestic workers from poorer countries who have come to Rome to make a living and escape situations in their homelands.

Understanding the intricacies of these situations is difficult sometimes because Lahiri, in these stories, chooses to withhold details about her characters. For instance, none of the characters are given names. At best, a few are given one initial only by which we can identify them, but most are represented as types: the wife, the husband, the friend, the other friend, the widow, the mother, the expat, the brother, and so on. In the stories with first person narrators, the narrators do not have names either. And when people are identified as foreigners, their countries of origin are not specified; it is left to readers to guess. This lack of focus causes the stories to more easily function as parables or allegories, perhaps, but it also causes occasional confusion in figuring out what exactly is going on.

Lahiri has a gift for imbuing importance into seemingly ordinary people and situations. She often describes commonplace events, but we come to understand, as the stories progress, that just one critical thing is damaged or out of place. For example, “The Boundary” is narrated by a teenager living outside the city whose father rents an adjoining cottage to foreigners on vacation; her family’s lifestyle has been profoundly impacted by an earlier attack on her father by xenophobic locals. In “P’s Parties,” a marriage is irrevocably changed by a single indiscretion the husband commits while socializing with affluent friends. In “The Procession,” the death of their child, which happened decades ago, haunts a couple on vacation.

Lahiri’s writing style has lost little of its elegance; maybe that’s because even though these stories were originally written in Italian, she has self-translated most of them. (A few have been translated by Todd Portnowitz; these have been specified in an afterword.) For a writer to display this much expertise while working in a language acquired as an adult is extraordinary to say the least. I would say that these stories do not quite reach the level of excellence displayed in Lahiri’s Bengali-American tales. At the same time, though, Roman Stories is a very good short story collection – certainly better than most. It is entertaining and insightful and at times deeply emotional. I was an expat in various foreign countries for many years, and I can empathize with the difficulties and conundrums Lahiri’s characters face as strangers in a strange land. As she wrote these stories, Lahiri herself was adjusting to living in her adopted country of Italy, and as I was reading of certain situations her characters go through I couldn’t help but think that the author was drawing from her own experiences.

In conclusion, then, I recommend this book. It is erudite, absorbing, perceptive, and empathetic.