Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Guardian:
The Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection is an urgent and affecting portrait of Rome in nine stories featuring characters, both native and non-native, who inhabit the city without ever feeling fully at home. As one remarks, “Rome switches between heaven and hell.” Like Whereabouts, Lahiri’s previous book, this collection was composed in Italian and then translated into English. Lahiri self-translated six out of the nine stories, entrusting editor Todd Portnowitz with the remaining three. The translation is supple and elegant throughout; sentences gleam and flow, adding to the vividness and immediacy of these tales about buried grief, belonging and unbelonging, the meaning of home and the cost of exile.
The characters, always unnamed, are sick and homesick; they worry about their bodies and they reminisce about past homes and past lives. Sometimes a parent, a friend or a child is remembered or mourned; always, a degree of guilt is involved. In The Procession, set during the festivities of La Festa de Noantri, a couple arrive in Rome to celebrate the wife’s 50th birthday. The city, we learn, holds a special place in her heart; it was where she had studied for a year when she was 19 and where she had fallen in love for the first time. But peace will repeatedly elude her during her stay. Upsetting details accumulate. Morning light that startles “like an electric charge”; a chandelier that threatens to come crashing down. French doors that slam and shatter. A room that will not unlock. Another that brings to mind an operating theatre and a dead son.
More here.