MY WORK HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT LOOKING AT THE SHADOWS

There are few writers that publishing pauses for; Jhumpa Lahiri is one of them.

- MANDIRA NAYAR

She burst on to the literary scene with Interpreter of Maladies 25 years ago. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, changing her life, publishing and the immigrant experience in English forever. Lahiri, however, has only grown since then. She migrated from English to Italian with Whereabouts (2018). She is back with Roman Stories-short stories written in Italian-that are evocative, elegant, intimate and, like with Lahiri, difficult to forget.

Her canvas is vast. There is the true-blue Italianin 'P's Parties, a short story in the collection; the immigrant the one looking to build a new home, and who will always be an intruder; the one who left Rome after an attack; and the woman who returns. Lahiri conjures up a city that is changing. Her Rome is not only of the sunny piazzas but of the shadows as well. And it is in these dark places that Lahiri's writing shines. As she says in an interview with THE WEEK, "But every love story is so much more complicated than that wedding moment. That's why we are sort of so obsessed culturally with weddings because it is this moment of pure joy, and we are not thinking about the shadows." Excerpts:

Q\ Can you talk briefly about writing again in Italian?

A\ The books are all glued together at the same time. They were siblings growing up at the same time. One follows the other in publication reality. I started writing these stories early on in the experiment of writing in Italian, and some of them predate the writing of Whereabouts.

Q\ Is it now the language that you are going to write in? How is it different from writing in English?