Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

Abstract

It is often said that short stories do not sell well because readers prefer novels. Yet the short story has recently made a comeback. As Sam Baker observed in a 2014 article in The Telegraph, the brevity of the genre seems the perfect fit for our fast-paced life. “Many people struggle to find the time to engage with a full-length novel. A short story offers the perfect antidote—it's the equivalent of listening to a single track of music instead of the whole album” (Baker, “Irresistible”). These miniature literary worlds of short stories are a distillation of few emotions and ideas authenticated by a meticulous care for details, which manage to keep alive the audience's short attention span. In France, the annual Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle sustains the interest in the short story by recognizing polyvalent writers who have also distinguished themselves in other genres, from the two most recent winners—Regis Jauffret and Caroline Lamarche—to internationally renowned previous awardees like André Chedid, René Depestre, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. And while the Italian Strega Prize awarded in the 1950s to collections of short stories by writers of the caliber of Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, and Dino Buzzati are considered the exception to the rule, more recent eloquent signs of the return of the short story on the international scene are the Nobel Prize to the Canadian writer Alice Munro, the Folio Prize to the American George Saunders, and the Man Booker International Prize to the American “flash-fiction” writer Lydia Davis.Among contemporary short-story writers who convey “perfect, nuanced, subtle, luminous understanding and expression of people's lives, of the human heart” (Baker, “Irresistible”), the name of Jhumpa Lahiri stands out. A multicultural author at the crossroads of three different continents (born in London from Bengali parents and brought up in New England), she has authored novels such as The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), yet the short story is the literary form that has defined her more distinctly so far. Her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), received the O. Henry Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award), to be followed by Unaccustomed Earth (2008), winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and, more recently, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019)—also available in Italian as Racconti italiani (2019)—to which Jhumpa Lahiri has contributed as editor and co-translator.1Precisely this latter editorial endeavor offers an engaging vantage point from which to delve into Lahiri's compelling journey into literatures and languages. The plural, in Lahiri's case, is de rigueur, considering not only her deep exploration of tensions and negotiations between Indian and Anglo-American traditions but also, more surprisingly, her bold decision to problematize this binarism by embracing a third culture, the Italian one, going as far as selecting its language for her own literary creation, despite having no prior personal, family, or historical connections with it. With The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri shows the power of storytelling and translation to widen the horizon of understanding and create connections. She makes ideas travel, challenging cultural monopolies and the constraints of identity politics.Italy has amply contributed to the multifaceted tradition of the short story—from the novelle of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone to its sixteenth-century followers Matteo Bandello and Anton Francesco Doni, the seventeenth-century Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile, Adriano Banchieri's I Trastulli di Villa, Giovanni Sagredo's witty L'Arcadia in Brenta, and the eighteenth-century Novelle morali by Francesco Soave. But it is in the late nineteenth century that the genre burgeons in Western culture, thanks to leading writers from Edgar Allan Poe (who, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” recodifies its rules regarding length, ending, and unity of effect) to Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Anton Čechov, among many others. The Italian short story follows suit, increasing exponentially not only in output but also in variety of subjects and approaches, effectively marking the transition from romanticism to realism, naturalism, and aestheticism. The genre continues to thrive in the twentieth century, when it acquires more nuanced and complex features, blurring historical and geographical borders, and blending different registers and styles borrowed from travel writing, autobiography, social critique, and psychological inquiry.Jhumpa Lahiri's The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories captures this substantial and diverse production and recasts it creatively, offering a refreshing image of Italian authors not simply as members of a national corpus but also as contributors to an imaginative process and a critical discourse addressing timely global questions across national borders. The wealth of authors included in Lahiri's anthology attests to the pervasiveness of the short story in post-unification Italy. This is all the more intriguing because, paradoxically, early twentieth-century intellectuals were lamenting the provincialism of Italy on the international literary scene, which they ascribed to the lack of a sustained production of powerful novels able to engage a vast array of interlocutors inside and outside the newly-born nation. Apart from a few exceptions, namely Alessandro Manzoni and Giovanni Verga (albeit not exempt from criticism for their detached representation of popular classes), Antonio Gramsci deplored the Italian novel as rhetorical and petty, devoid of authentic national-popular and universal human content (Marxismo, 121–22). Likewise, in 1929 Leo Ferrero declared that Italy renounced Europe because Italian writers knew neither their country nor the outside world. In order to have an international dimension, a novelist should depict his/her own nation inspired by moral sentiment, political passion, and the sense of tradition, but always implying other countries at the same time (“Perché l'Italia,” 21–29). Lahiri's renewed attention to the Italian short story challenges this static and provincial view of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian cultural scene. Her anthology foregrounds a literary milieu in great ferment, with a surprisingly multifarious narrative activity that innovates from the point of view of both content and form, in dialogue with international interlocutors that facilitate aesthetic experimentation and a broader circulation of ideas.Any anthology is the result of its editor's personal choices as to what to include and what to leave out. The editor's imprint on The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is, all the more reason, particularly significant. A peculiar element is, for instance, Lahiri's decision to bypass chronology2 and to arrange the stories in reverse alphabetical order, starting from Elio Vittorini, the renowned novelist, translator, and literary critic, editor of the anthology Americana which, in 1941, brought to the Italian audience the most important (and at that time still rather unknown) American authors—from Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Steinbeck to James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Fante, deeply influencing the literary consciousness of a fascist-dominated nation.Arguably, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories will be remembered as Jhumpa Lahiri's Italian anthology in the same way in which we have crystallized in our minds this illustrious predecessor with whom, not accidentally, she engages on several levels, in conversation with his exemplary endeavor, as she explains in her own introduction: “Vittorini was my guiding light as I assembled this book […] and it is in homage to him and to that landmark work—to the spirit of saluting distant literary comrades, of looking beyond borders and of transforming the unknown into the familiar—that I offer the present contribution” (Penguin “Introduction,” xxi).Roland Barthes, in his seminal article “Reflections on a Manual” claims that “the literary manual and the literary text, the pedagogy and the practice of literature have nothing of consequence to do with each other. […] Teaching prefers history to literature because historical facts—in their traditional sense of a narrative sequence of events that are codified, categorized, put in a precise order—“make sense,” whereas literature “unmakes” sense (Barthes “Reflections,” 70, my emphasis). “The literary manual seeks to impose an imperialistic discipline that literature repudiates” (Barthes, 70). These remarks are particularly appropriate to Lahiri's operation. Her new order (or, intentionally, lack thereof) aims to offer a fresher image of Italian literature and culture, to tell a new story about Italy that perhaps the Italian eye would not capture while following the traditional, regimented concatenation of cause and effect, the logical thread of past and present, the genealogy of literary masters and disciples. Each work in her anthology speaks to us on its own terms, be it penned by canonical authors like Verga, Pirandello, Svevo, Moravia, Sciascia, and Calvino, well-established or emerging female signatures from Deledda, Morante, Ortese, and Ginzburg to Cialente and Campo, or niche writers like D'Eramo, Delfini, D'Arzo, or Bianciardi, independently of periodization and canonical influences. The variety of Italian regions, from Sicily to Tuscany and Friuli Venezia-Giulia is not only represented by the authors' diverse geographical origins but also emerges from the setting of the stories. Likewise, pivotal historical conjunctures provide the background to numerous plots, offering insights into the social and political evolution of Italy, from the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the woman's question, and the avant-garde, to fascism and the postwar years.Lahiri also transcends the standard notion-based authors' biographies. She crafts fresh portrayals of writers, unencumbered by many dates, titles of major works, and the usual salient information. She does not linger on technicalities, but rather brings writers and stories to life, in little cameos made of curious unfamiliar facts, impressions, and contacts that these writers established and that their stories fostered. One recurring factor in this rich network of relationships is the pioneering role of periodicals as promoters of innovative poetics and international synergies that delineate a much more dynamic literary scene than the conventional framework would suggest. Indeed, numerous stories in her collection were published in leading journals across the political spectrum (La Tribuna; La Stampa; Il Corriere della sera; L'Unità) and in magazines (Omnibus, L'Europeo, La fiera letteraria, Oggi, Comunità, Il Mondo, Città, Lettere d'oggi, Letteratura, Tempo presente, Cronache, Le grandi firme)—many of them no longer in print, hence offering captivating snapshots of forgotten cultural scenarios. Students will find these profiles very accessible and palatable. Even Italian scholars already familiar with these authors will have a chance to discover or refresh many intriguing facets of their careers and approaches to literature, beyond canonical, crystallized images.The unavoidable question emerges as to what extent this anthology speaks about Lahiri herself. Her prominence as a writer tempts us to read her selections of Italian authors and material through the lens of her overall poetics. Even without implying an intentional correlation, commonalities emerge between the stories she has edited and her own works, and this adds relevance to the volume beyond its immediate scope. Translation, for instance, is an approach and a practice that she shares with numerous authors in her anthology, who intensely worked with foreign texts or who had exposure to linguistic and cultural environments beyond their native Italy, in ways that fertilized their identity and creativity. Besides Vittorini, who learned English by translating Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and, as we have seen, moved on to becoming a pivotal mediator between the United States and Italy, Lahiri features other writers who participated in multiple linguistic and cultural contexts. We find the well-known examples of Italo Svevo (who was educated in German, spoke Triestine dialect at home, and learned English with James Joyce) and Italo Calvino (who was born in Cuba, lived in France, and consistently investigated language and translation), as well as of other prominent figures like Cesare Pavese (translator of Melville, DosPassos, and Joyce), Beppe Fenoglio (a translator of Coleridge and Hopkins, who also wrote his last novel in English), Anna Banti (prolific translator from French and English—Colette, Woolf, Austen, Thackeray), and Antonio Tabucchi (who lived and taught in Portugal, wrote extensively about its literature, and published in Portuguese). Numerous less iconic figures reinforce this plurilingual and multicultural framework, which makes it reductive to qualify them with a single adjective of nationality. For instance, Cristina Campo was self-taught in many languages, and translated Dickinson, Donne, Carlos Williams, and Weil; Fausta Cialente, a rootless Sardinian who died in England, translated James and Alcott; Tommaso Landolfi, a lover of foreign languages, was competent in French, Spanish, German, and English, studied Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Swedish, and Russian, and wrote about Gogol and Akhmatova; Alba De Cespedes, a Cuban by birth, moved to Italy and then to France, published her first novel in French and translated it into Italian; Anna Maria Ortese lived in Libya as a child, and Fabrizia Ramondino was raised in Spain, France, and Germany.This pervasive foreignness embedded into the authors' alleged Italianness raises questions about the boundaries and meaning of national identity, which are magnified by other instances of linguistic and cultural transfer in the stories, and foreground the asymmetries and obstacles in interpersonal relations. Dialogues and exchanges reveal an intrinsic alterity that turns individuals into strangers even in their own linguistic and cultural environment. This communicative and psychological schism finds a paradigmatic example in Parise's story “Melancholy,” where the term “estranged” (54) insistently connotes the female protagonist's self-perception.Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark (1992), shows how most great novels of the American canon (by white male writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald) conceal within themselves the unnamable but fundamental presence of otherness—in those cases black identity, necessary to the mainstream writers' own cultural self-definition. In Lahiri's anthology, too, we find authors, characters, situations, and issues that we could define as, if not unnamable, at least problematic, provocative, and marginalized, because they undermine certainties, expectations, and traditional values. Questions of identity and belonging in the stories are often predicated upon hybridity3 and mutability, which, as Lahiri herself observes in her introduction, converge in the recurring topos of the metamorphosis. These transformations effectively capture the great contradictions of any culture, debunking the myth of cultural purity and of the monolithic nation. Not accidentally, various authors in her anthology—among them Alvaro, Svevo, Pirandello, Sciascia, Cialente, Bilenchi—underscore the regional element in their own autobiographical background as much as in the peripheral geographical and cultural setting of their own stories. In the age of globalism and cosmopolitanism, against the backdrop of the current tensions regarding the Europe-building design, and of the cooptation of national identity as a card provocatively played against different kinds of minority groups, Lahiri's attention to regions enriches and problematizes a supposedly single “Italian identity” by showing that local identities, with their own traditions and languages, are real, and that Italy's national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries are quite blurred, to say the least.Lahiri defines her anthology a self-portrait but not designed to be that. Authenticated by her direct experience of Italy, this volume adds a polyphony of voices in which her transnational mind reverberates, reinforcing her idea of “home” in constant tension between domesticity and foreignness.The polyvocal, multicultural, hybrid condition that Lahiri highlights in The Penguin Books of Italian Short Stories is the existential challenge that she openly addresses in all the works she has penned in Italian, in addition to her fiction in English. Her engagement with Italian short stories as an editor and translator, indeed, is one of the many ways in which she has forged a connection with Italy, its language, literature, and culture. Italy is represented in several stories in her collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), from the Pinocchio marionette that Ruma's father brings back from Florence for his grandchild, and memories of previous layovers in Rome, to the setting of the last story “Going Ashore,” where the two protagonists, Hema and Kaushik, meet by chance in Rome after two long decades, and relive their younger years exploring Italy together. But Lahiri has drawn international attention for her deeper involvement with Italy as the author of the memoir In altre parole (2015) [In Other Words, 2016], which narrates her sort of rebirth into a new self, shaped and spoken by a new language, precisely Italian, the language in which Lahiri has chosen to write after spending several years in Rome. Furthermore, in Italian she has also published the autobiographical essay Il vestito dei libri (2015, 2017) [The Clothing of Books, 2017] and the short novel Dove mi trovo (2018), translated into English by Lahiri herself as Whereabouts (2021). The title Dove mi trovo, meaning both “Where I am” and “Where I find myself,”4 condenses identity and place as two complex, contradictory dimensions that in Lahiri simultaneously define and destabilize the self.Through these works Lahiri has extensively documented her conflictual relationship with language and cultural identity, an unavoidable tension between belonging and estrangement that translation exemplifies as a practice and a condition of in-betweenness. While James Joyce was working at Ulysses, he complained that he could not express himself in English without enclosing himself “in a tradition” (Ellmann, Joyce 397). He threatened to “unlearn English and to write in French or Italian” (Ellmann, 397, my emphasis), which means to be ready to embrace the foreigner's predicament, to accept the reduction of one's own linguistic competence, to agree to regress to the beginner's status. This is precisely the step that Lahiri has taken by switching to Italian. Thinking of her cultural and linguistic background, we could define Bengali as an inheritance from nature (Lahiri's parents), English as an inevitable acquisition through culture (the British and American environments in which she grew up), and Italian as her own elective affection, as she has deliberately decided to be adopted by Italian, both emotionally and rationally, authenticating the opening quotation from Antonio Tabucchi in In Other Words: “I needed a different language: a language that was a place of affection and reflection” (vii). One of the characters in The Namesake, Moushumi, echoes this salvaging, symbolic elsewhere, “a third language, a third culture” (Namesake 433)—French in her case—which becomes “her refuge” (433) because she approaches it “unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever” (433). When, during a recent interview at Georgetown University, I asked Lahiri to weigh the gains and losses in her search for a new voice and a new self in a new language, she promptly replied that she lost nothing; she only gained (“Stories from Italy”). It is quite courageous of her to maintain this affirmative, optimistic attitude considering the distressing labor of her linguistic metamorphosis that she herself has shared with her audience on numerous occasions.In the introduction to The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri addresses this love-hate relationship with an ambivalent, treacherous verbal medium, and the wager she places on translation as the only path toward crosscultural understanding, while acknowledging the impossibility of transparency in linguistic exchange: “Language is the substance of literature, but language also locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity. Translation, in the end, is the key. Only works in translation can broaden the literary horizon, open doors, break down the wall” (Penguin, xx). She hence reinforces the perspective of José Saramago, for whom “Writers create national literatures with their languages, but world literature is written by translators” (Appel, 40), and of George Steiner, who claims that “Without translation, we would inhabit provinces bordering on silence” (Jaggi “George”). Yet, at the same time Lahiri's description of the bumpy road to her mastery of a new idiom, and the disorienting experiences of many of her characters, who are pulled by different cultures that they perceive as irreconcilable, cannot dissipate awareness of an unavoidable untranslatability.A character in Lahiri's own fiction who embodies the contradictory nature of language is Mr. Kapasi, the translator in Interpreter of Maladies. As a linguistic and cultural mediator, he is supposed to facilitate communication but is unable to bridge the gap between his Indian values and those of the American Mrs. Das. The similarities he had imagined between them, making him fantasize about a possible love story, do not exist. While Mr. Kapasi showcases the marvels of his own country, striving to give his visitors a chance to be defamiliarized by the authentic taste of a different culture, the India in which the Das family is immersed never transcends the status of a simulacrum perpetuating the power of Western commodification. They rely on the narrative mediation of their tour book instead of establishing a direct connection with the places right before their eyes, and even Mr. Kapasi's training as an interpreter becomes instrumental to their own behavioral codes and worldview. Yet we find silences and an inability to understand, to share, and to translate, even among characters of the same language and culture—for instance in Lahiri's collection of stories Unaccustomed Earth. We can think of the prejudices and lack of solidarity of Hema's parents toward Kaushik's parents despite their common experience of migration from India. “Their parents had liked one another only for the sake of their origins, for the sake of a time and place to which they'd lost access” (315), the narrator claims when, contaminated by the American mindset and way of life, their shared allegiance to their roots fails to preserve affinities and to facilitate mutual support. Indeed, as Hema reminisces, “a line was drawn between our two families” (245), who soon drift apart, like strangers to one another.Likewise, in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories we have the poignant example of Umberto Saba's “The Hen,” which confronts us with an astonishing lack of understanding between mother and son. The narrator asks: “Was it possible that a mother did not understand her son? That a son, to make himself understood by his mother, had to explain himself as to a stranger?” (Penguin, 97). Lahiri's collection of Italian stories stages a quest for a language able to break down some walls, to penetrate an enduring muteness about inertias and asymmetries in interpersonal communication and social relations, for instance in the context of family, woman's condition, marriage—questions that are also central to Lahiri's own fiction. But what if the diseases that Interpreter of Maladies evokes were, more radically, language itself—the inability to possess any language adequate enough to fully express all we harbor within ourselves, first of all to ourselves and then to others, and to translate into our own sensitivity all that the others are and say? The Pirandellian existential tragedy par excellence.The Romanian naturalized French philosopher Emil Cioran, to whom Lahiri refers in The Clothing of Books (40), asserts that “One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland—and no other” (Cioran, Anathemas, 12). The German writer W.G. Sebald, discussing melancholy in the language of Jean Améry (pseudonym of Austrian-born Jewish essayist Hanns Chaim Mayer, who settled in Belgium after surviving internment in Auschwitz), states that “For those whose business is language, it is only in language that the unhappiness of exile can be overcome” (Natural, 161). For her part, with her personal experience and her literary works, Lahiri problematizes both language and country as dwellings and spaces of belonging. If, as Martin Heidegger wrote, “[l]anguage is the house of being” (Heidegger, “Letter,” 239), Lahiri dwells in a nomadic homelessness. She has repeatedly admitted that she does not fully own any language and that she is used “to a kind of linguistic exile” (“I am, in Italian,” The Guardian; “Teach Yourself Italian,” New Yorker). This lack of a permanent expressive residency also explains her choice to withhold details about geographical locations. For instance, in Dove mi trovo [Whereabouts], she provides no explicit designations of places, just as she has omitted to identify Rhode Island in several of her works until The Lowland. And in the chapter of Dove mi trovo titled “Da nessuna parte” [“Nowhere”] she wonders: “Esiste un posto dove non siamo di passaggio?” (Dove, 159) [“Is there any place we're not moving through?” (Whereabouts, 153)]. Her only possible dwelling seems movement, instability, and temporality. In so doing, she invites us to consider the difference between “home” and “roots,” underscoring visions of ourselves composed of both heritage and new experiences.As she avows in The Clothing of Books, “On the one hand I want desperately to belong, to have a clear identity. On the other, I refuse to belong, and I believe that my hybrid identity enriches me. I will probably always remain torn between these two roads, these two impulses” (64). Already in her 2011 autobiographical piece “Trading Stories. Notes from an Apprenticeship,” she highlighted that, in reaction to her father, who stripped himself “of the ‘reassurance of belonging’” (“Trading” New Yorker) by leaving family and country for a new continent, for much of her life she wanted to belong to a place, either India, where her parents came from, or America. Yet it is ultimately through literary creation that she can recodify the meaning of inhabiting by transcending the binarism between domesticity and displacement. The contemporary Mitteleuropean writer Claudio Magris, who, like Lahiri, is traversed and shaped by borders without yielding to nihilistic impulses, connotes literary activity as “trasloco” (Danubio, 15), that is, relocation, a movement to always new places that become new homes, albeit temporary ones (Pireddu, 58–59). Lahiri, too, experiences writing as a continual transition across domestic milieux: “When I became a writer, my desk became home; there was no need for another. Every story is a foreign territory, which, in the process of writing, is occupied and then abandoned. I belong to my work, to my characters, and in order to create new ones I leave the old ones behind. My parents' refusal to let go or to belong fully to either place is at the heart of what I, in a less literal way, try to accomplish in writing. Born of my inability to belong, it is my refusal to let go.” (“Trading,” New Yorker)Her collection of stories Unaccustomed Earth exhibits this extraterritoriality—at once reassuring and lacerating—starting from its title, a citation from Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Custom-House,” which Lahiri chooses as her epigraph. In his text—the preface to The Scarlet Letter—Hawthorne discusses his ambivalent feelings toward his ancestors and his hometown. The stern Puritan morality in which he was born sounds inhumane to him, yet he feels part of a genealogy and of Salem, nonetheless. “Unaccustomed” is an overdetermined adjective, particularly fitting for Lahiri's own fictional and personal world. It connotes the land as a space of identity and of homeliness not simply “new” but also “not familiar,” “unusual,” “outlandish.” All these nuances appear in the aggregate of foreign translations of Lahiri's book, but with a different emphasis according to the language. For instance, the Italian translation opted for Una nuova terra, where “nuova” [new] underscores novelty but loses the idea of difference from, opposition to, relationality with a norm, a standard. The French and the German translations privileged the idea of foreignness with, respectively, Sur une terre étrangère and Fremde erde, while in Spanish it became Tierra desacostumbrada (“unusual”). Arguably, all these connotations coexist in the experience of migration and in the Indian-American hyphenated identities that Lahiri explores in her fiction as an onerous incongruity. The way Ashima comes to perceive her cultural alienation in The Namesake is one poignant example: For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complica