Your story in this summer’s Fiction Issue, “P’s Parties,” is narrated by an Italian man, a writer, who was born in Rome and has spent his whole life there. When did you start thinking of telling the story from this perspective?
The story began with his perspective; it was the only one I ever considered. I started exploring the idea for this about two years after my family and I first moved to Rome, in 2012. It began very quickly with the first sentence, but it took a long time to tease out and to structure. It was one of the first short stories I attempted to write in Italian, at a time when I was still on a very steep learning curve in terms of understanding how to write in that language. It took time for my Italian to mature to the point where I could begin building a story on this scale. When I moved back to the United States in 2015, it was still unfinished. I continued to work on it sporadically whenever I returned to Rome during breaks from teaching. I see from an e-mail that I was still working on it in January of 2017. That e-mail was to the writer Caterina Bonvicini, who, along with Francesca Marciano, was one of the early readers of the story. Domenico Starnone read it, too, at a later stage. I think translating Starnone’s novels “Ties” and “Trick” gave me the push I needed in terms of language and story, and how to handle time. The story was first published in the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti, in 2019.
“P’s Parties” appears in your new book, “Roman Stories,” which will be published in October. These stories, like all your recent work, were first written in Italian, and the collection in its original form, “Racconti Romani,” came out in Italy last year. “P’s Parties” was translated into English by Todd Portnowitz, with your collaboration. What was it like to return to the story when you were working on its English incarnation?
I keep returning to this story! In the sense that, after it was first published in Italian, I revisited and revised it, a few years later, for the publication of “Racconti Romani.” It went beyond tweaking the language; I was still dissatisfied with a few details, some of the dialogue, and the precise nature of certain interactions between the characters. Looking back at that first version, I see a number of sentences that were superfluous, which I subsequently cut for the Italian version of the book. I also slightly altered the Italian title, from “P’s Party” (“La Festa di P.”) to “P’s Parties” (“Le Feste di P.”). I would say that it is the most significantly revised of my stories to date, in Italian or in English. Perhaps for that reason, I asked Todd Portnowitz to translate it for me. I just couldn’t face going back inside it. Most of my contributions to this translation have to do with word choice, register, and tone. We each have our own vocabularies and way of saying things. It’s also been illuminating to work on the story yet again with you and others at the magazine. So many things can stand to be clarified and improved, even after so many versions. The New Yorker’s English constitutes its own language, in a way. Yet another “translation.”
The story is about a series of parties held by a woman, referred to in these pages as P, who is an old friend of the narrator’s wife. What do you want these parties to evoke for the reader?
Parties are a parenthesis in life, along the lines of vacations and other types of journeys. They have internal “plots” and are good fictional material for this reason. They always mean one thing for the host and another thing for the guests. They are characterized by surfaces and depths. They are spaces in which it’s possible to reinvent oneself, even if only for a little while. Though the point of any party is for all the guests to enjoy themselves, I don’t think that’s ever really the case. To borrow from Tolstoy, each party is happy and unhappy in its own way. There is always someone who would rather be somewhere else, someone who would rather just be home, someone who is only pretending to have a good time, someone who ends up feeling offended or offending someone else. I’ve always been struck by the internal languages of parties; they are great indicators of cultural differences and norms. For example, I was raised by parents who were always hosting or attending parties that were specific to their Bengali-immigrant circle in the U.S. When I grew older and began attending parties as a young adult, especially in the homes of American families, I noticed how the energy and composition of those gatherings varied. Then, when I moved to Rome, I was introduced to yet another style of party. It was by attending dinner parties and other types of parties in the homes of a wide variety of Romans that I felt that I was really entering into life here. I don’t know what I want these parties to evoke for the reader. A sense of feeling at once lost and found, maybe. The tension between uneasiness and ease. I continue to ask myself why we sometimes feel more at home in another person’s home than in our own.
The narrator’s son has moved abroad and is immersed in his new life. How deeply does the narrator feel his absence? Do you think he would have been as attuned to the foreigners at P’s parties if his son were still living in Rome?
The narrator misses his son keenly, and this longing creates a tacit rift between him and his wife. He reads his son’s decision to study and live abroad, and to blossom away from home, as a form of rejection. So he already feels unmoored when the story begins. Parent-child-separation drama is something like the city of Rome: multilayered and, as they say, eternal. I imagine that the narrator is resistant to change on various fronts. He rarely leaves Rome, for example, and when in Rome he tends to stay put. But he’s surrounded by people who are adventurous, not only his son but also—in separate, more subtle ways—his wife. And he’s attracted to P’s parties because he likes the idea of mingling with people who come from different walks of life, who either blow in and out of Rome or never fully belong to it. It’s just that he can’t ever quite manage to make the leap to complicate his life in any fundamental way. I think many people contain a similar mix of provincialism and curiosity about, or even a yearning for, what they don’t know. They feel unfulfilled but also frightened to risk what they call familiar, what they identify with. In the narrator’s case, his attachment to Rome and its ways is a source of regret, but one that’s not deep enough for him to do anything about it.
