No Substance #175: The Stories Within Roman Stories
1.
A couple of weeks ago someone ran into the back of my car. No one was hurt greatly (my partner had a bruise down the side of her chest from the seat belt) but the car was written off. Well, my car. The guy who hit me got to drive off in, what one of my friend’s later termed, a beast of a car. I had to get towed. A week later, the insurance called and told me they were going to write it off. By then it was being held in a shop that, according to locals, was on its fifth or sixth name change due to poor reviews. Maybe it was for the best.
2.
I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Roman Stories a few weeks back and liked it, though with reservations. I’d not read any of Lahiri’s work before and I was drawn to this one because she had written it Italian and then translated it mostly herself. (She did this with her previous novel, Whereabouts.) There are nine stories in Roman Stories and three of them are also translated by Todd Portnowitz. Lahiri’s first work was written in English, but in 2012 she moved to Italy and around 2015 began writing in Italian. I found (and still find) the choice interesting, as well as the translation of the work from Italian to English, and I have to admit, that’s why I read the book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you can’t tell on the page. I found that interesting as well. The translations are excellent, and the language is simple and elegant.
3.
I had never been in an accident that required a tow before. I’d had a car towed before, though. My second car started spewing smoke out of the engine on a highway. I got it off the road, called roadside assistance, who came and told me something in the engine was cracked. It was pretty simple. Reassuring, even. But when you’re in an accident, I discovered, roadside assistance will not come and tow your car if part of the back is jammed into the wheel. I’m sorry, they will say over the phone, that’s an insurance issue. It’s a strange, somewhat surreal world. You’re stuck on the side of a road (in my case, another highway) and you’re shuffled from one set of hold music to another, and no one, it seems, will help you.
4.
Roman Stories is about life in Rome, about returning to it, leaving it, about people living on the edges, those who aren’t fully embraced or feel like outsiders. In many ways, it’s an outsider’s collection and the vision Lahiri provides is not particularly pleasant. In ‘Well-Lit House’, a refugee and his family are given an apartment in a poor neighbourhood, only to be driven out by the poor (or sketchy as Lahiri refers to it) and racist neighbours. The narrator’s wife and her children return to the country they’ve fled and the narrator ends up becoming homeless while he attempts to restart their life again. The issue of racism comes up again and again in the nine stories, so you can’t take ‘Well-Lit House’ by itself, which is good, because it’s a problematic portrayal as the racism of Italy is laid at the feet of the working class and they bear the responsibility of it, whereas those with power within the city are largely absent and unmentioned, and their racist policies, or dog whistling through the media unmentioned. I don’t say this to excuse racism because I don’t wish to excuse it, but I also think that if you write a book about Rome and about how it treats migrants and refugees, you also have to show those who have power in these transactions. Lahiri, by and far, doesn’t. She picks the easier target rather than the difficult one, the one that, it might be worth noting, she might be closer to.
5.
My first car was a car I bought for fifteen hundred dollars. Over the next few years it probably cost me ten times that in repairs, until finally the rust got it. My next car had an engine crack, as I said, or something like that. My third got traded in. My fourth written off. I suppose it’s not too bad to have owned four cars, but I tend to drive them till they break down, so I’m not going from one to another like other people do. Also, I’m a bit agnostic about cars. They’re useful but I don’t love them, or have particular favourites (outside cool old cars I could never own). My partner and I considered not buying a replacement, in fact, but we just don’t live in a place where you can get away without a car on a regular basis. So, we’ll have a new car in a few weeks, a kind of miracle, really. Searching for a new car took us out into Australia’s car market, which is, politely, kind of fucked. People are waiting three, six, even twelve months for a new car to arrive, so used cars are going for nearly new car prices. It’s a wild world, but we found one that will work for us.
6.
I was greatly fascinated by Lahiri’s mosaic structure of her book. She offers you nine visions of Rome and weaves them together through a series of largely nameless narrators. Taken individually there are some strong pieces like ‘P’s Parties’, ‘The Steps’, and ‘Dante Alighieri’, but the real strength of the book comes from the weave of all nine, the vision that is offered. It’s not perfect. It has flaws, like I said. I’m of the opinion that all fiction is political and I believe you can’t write a work that isn’t political. Write a book with a benevolent king who rules kindly and you are making a statement about that, even in a romantic fantasy. You can have fun with it, you don’t need to be serious with it, but there’s politics in it and you help create a kind of background level hum with work like that. It’s the same in crime novels where the police solve murders and help people. In a book that discusses Rome’s problems with outsiders, however, you can’t really be pretend to be non-political, and thus you have to talk about the things Lahiri doesn’t, and thus as a reader, you have to question her assumptions and portrayals, some of which are lacking. But it’s technically still a very good book, with a nice, quiet elegance about it.
7.
And lastly, an apology for missing last week. In all this car stuff, I got hit by a bagful of allergies, and just couldn’t get my shit together to write last week. But, back now, due to the miracle of time and drugs.
Mostly drugs.
Hope you’re all doing well.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)