Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

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 of and canonical The variety of Italian from to and is not only by the diverse geographical but also from the of the Likewise, historical the to offering into the social and political of from the of the the and the to and the also the She of by many of and the She not on but rather writers and stories to in made of and that writers and that their stories in this of is the of as of and international that a more literary scene the would stories in her collection were in leading across the political and in of no in offering of cultural will find and Italian with authors will have a to or many intriguing of their and to beyond crystallized as to what this anthology speaks 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Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.