April 02, 2008
Unaccustomed EarthLiterature
Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-awaited collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, hits bookshelves this week. As she makes her way around the US on an eight-city tour (she has a sold-out reading at Symphony Space tonight), gushing reviews have started pouring in. 
The Village Voice’s Lenora Todaro compares Lahiri to a “young Alice Munro” and praises the emotional wisdom of these stories. [link]
Eight long short stories (three of which were previously published in the New Yorker) make up this striking collection whose title was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same wornout soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
The Christian Science Monitor [link] says of Unaccustomed Earth: “Returning to themes she explored in her first novel, “The Namesake,” Pulitzer-Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri details with quiet precision the divide between American-born children and their Bengali parents in her new short-story collection.”
I disagree. I don’t think this book is so much about the divide between generations as it is about the lives of the second-generation, the lives of the children of immigrants. The parents here play a secondary role - they are lenses through which children grow to understand themselves better.
Lisa Fugard of the Los Angeles Times gets it when she writes [link], “In her latest work, “Unaccustomed Earth,” a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”
In New York magazine’s profile of Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Confidence Artist: Jhumpa Lahiri Isn’t Afraid to Provoke Tears” [link], Boris Kachka writes:
Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “ ’Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.”
Yes, Lahiri’s latest stories are once again about Bengali Americans, many of them set in Cambridge and London (where she was born), but keep going and it’s obvious that she has gone further and deeper, taken a turn in another direction, choosing to write about the experiences of second-generation Indian-Americans, about their fraught relationships with their parents, about multi-racial marriages, and at the end of it all, the human condition. (Elsewhere in Unaccustomed Earth, she takes us to Italy, Thailand, London, but what she does keep coming back to is Mass., Cambridge.)
The title story “Unaccustomed Earth” is (in the incredible Lahiri third person voice, as so many of the pieces in this collection are) about the fragile relationship between a 30-something daughter and her widow father. She is expecting, the mother of a young son, and married to a non-Indian. Her father’s first visit to her new home in Seattle is fraught with unspoken tension — her fear that he’ll expect her to invite him to move in with her family and his wish not to have her know about his “girlfriend.” (It was refreshing to me that this story was set in Seattle because it gave me a window into Lahiri’s amazing ability to create a sense of place.)
“Hell-Heaven” is written from the 1st person perspective. A daughter reminisces about her mother’s relationship with Pranab kaku, the “adopted uncle” who had such an important role in her childhood—and realizes as an adult that her mother was actually in love with him. This is at its core a story about the broken hearts of a mother and daughter; about how as adults we see situations in a new light because of our own experiences.
The protagonist of “A Choice of Accomodations” is Amit, a 40’ish year old husband and father who is on a weekend getaway with his wife Megan. They are attending the wedding of one of his high school and college friends (and crush) on the campus of his prestigious prep school in Massachusetts. This is a beautiful story about the unspoken expectations of a relationship, of marriage — and by placing Amit in a setting that so rooted in “a piece of his past that had nothing to do with the life he and Megan shared,” Lahiri explores the maze and intricacies of marriage, themes of companionship and aloneness, habits, and unspoken expectations.
“Only Goodness” is about Sudha, a sister who carries the guilt of her brother’s alcoholism and is forced to come to terms with it. Like so many of Lahiri’s characters, she too carries a burden, a grief, a secret … a heaviness that touches me in a deep place as a reader.
Maybe the biggest departure from the Jhumpa that we know is “Nobody’s Business” where the protagonist is Paul, a white graduate student who is in love with his Indian-American housemate Sang (Sangeeta). He carries a secret about her troubled relationship and struggles to figure out whether to say or do something about it or to stay silent.
And, finally, there’s the trilogy “Hema and Kaushik,” where Lahiri experiments with perspective in a way that blew me over. The characters are tied to each other loosely because their families are friends and they lived under the same roof for a few months as teenagers. We are taken into each of their worlds, the loss of Kaushik’s mother, his shock at finding that his mother has remarried, his complicated relationship with his new step sisters … Then life brings them together again years later in Rome. Written in a take on the first and second-person (you), the characters take turns addressing each other in parts I (Hema in “Once in a Lifetime” and II (Kaushik in “Year’s End”), then Jhumpa returning to the third person for most of Part III (“Going Ashore”), but returning to Hema’s voice as she once again talks to Kaushik.
On NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Maureen Corrigan says, “To read Lahiri’s short story collection and to only take away an experience of cultural tourism would be akin to reading Dante only to retain how medieval Italians slurp their spaghetti. Lahiri’s fiction delves deep into the universal theme of isolation.” She defines the collection as “tales of immigration but also takes its rightful place with tales of modernism.”
Adele Waldman in The New Republic [link] writes, “Jhumpa Lahiri’s books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one. … Her tales of marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, and grappling with the death of adult parents are the opposite of exotic; her fiction winds up painting a very intelligent portrait of upper middle class life. They aren’t immigrant stories, not in a traditional sense…”
Maybe that is true on one level, but I don’t think any Indian-American who picks up this book can say that Lahiri’s stories do not reflect nuances of our existence as children of immigrants, as cultural minorities, as the oft-represented “other”; nuances that we rarely encounter in the books that make their way into our hands. I’d venture to say that these are immigrant stories too - stories of a new America where culture and race and tradition collide in unexpected ways and where, at the end of it, we are left with a better understanding of both sides of a story and of the (this is cliche, I know, but I can’t think of any other way to say it), the universal human condition. I think that’s what makes Lahiri’s work genius - she gets at this without going cliche on us.
One final note: And yet, Bengali-American is the defining characteristic of this book for the publishers, it seems. I’m always fascinated by the labeling of books, the copyright page, where this book is categorized as: 1. Bengali Americans-Fiction 2. Bengali (South Asian people)-United States-Fiction … Whereas Lahiri’s first collection, Interpreter of Maladies is defined as: 1. East Indian Americans-Social life and customs-Fiction.
Sandhya on April 2, 2008 06:59 AM in Literature · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
“You mean you haven’t read it yet? I read an advanced copy. She really has outdone herself”
:)
I just finished Only Goodness last night. I don't think that Lahiri's stories are "genius"; they are pleasant and competent.
One unexpected reaction I had while reading Unaccustomed Earth: I appreciate Lahiri more now that I am older and find her observations about love, marriage, and family complex and interesting. I was a teenager when Interpreter of Maladies was a bestseller; I wonder if I will like it more if I read it again now.
What's her obsession with Bengali American characters? Has she expressed in interviews of some desire to create a Bengali English literature or something? Or is she able to write well only about characters she is overly familiar with? But then, growing up here, I don't see how she wont be fairly familiar with other desi cultures, if not non desi cultures.
Jhumpa Lahiri is a very, very good writer.
I have encountered criticism of her by British-Indian and Indian-American readers, who say things similar to the criticisms she mentions in the interview Sandhya quotes; "Oh she only writes about the same things, so boring, middle and upper class Indian Americans, so predictable, so annoying that she just writes the same things over and over."
If the yardstick of a good writer is that she changes the backgrounds of her characters with every book, then I guess these criticisms are valid. If she wrote about Chinese punk rockers in Texas in her next novel, and told us that she's working on a collection of short stories about Mexican astronauts and Polish farm workers in Yorkshire, they would be happy. Thankfully, this is not the yardstick of what a good writer is.
The good writer defines her own subjects and explores them with a sense of natural art. To only see the ethnicity and shared historical and cultural background of those she writes about, loosely affiliated around the generation of Indian Bengali immigrants to America from the 1960s and their children, is to only see the surface, and to miss the depths that she writes about.
Jhumpa is in some ways a miniaturist. She focuses on close detail and walks along a path winding through an intimately considered world that she knows well. It is familiar to her, it resonates, and from it she evokes stories of quiet, emotional immensity. Despite the sense of miniaturism, there is a lot of space and depth evoked in her stories. Like Chekov and others, by looking at the world she can touch with her hands, she suggests and describes universal experience and emotion.
Would anyone suggest (just to give two examples of writers that Jhumpa has said she admires), that Alice Munro is a limited writer simply because her stories revolve around small town Canadian life, or William Trevor is also limited, because he often writes about the lives of people in rural Ireland?
The writer creates her milieu. Her characters inhabit familiar spaces. From there, she follows her artistry. She creates resonant, evocative stories from the most placid material. That is part of her brilliance. Husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters. Like all the best writers, from a considered place she observes and fashions character and moments of universal insight and lyricism, lyricism in the sense of literature pointing at sublime, melancholy higher truths and resonance.
She is a very, very good writer.
3 · Ardy said
Apologies for the cliche, but I believe the best writers write what they know. Lahiri writes from the perspective of someone growing up between two worlds, born in London to Bengali parents and raised in New England. If her work begins to draw attention to a greater "Bengali English literature," as you say, then all the better, but I doubt that her main desire was anything more than to write from a place she knows well. I can't say this with all certainty because she hasn't yet done this, but if she were to write from a different cultural perspective I don't know that it would have the same pull, the same overwhelming ability to create a feeling and picture in your mind of a life that her current Bengali stories do. I've never felt so transported as when I read her work, and so involved in a character; it's amazing what she can do with just a few sentences. And though yes, of course she must certainly be fairly familiar with other desi/non-desi cultures, I think her writing will prove to have its best impact when coming from her Bengali perspective. Many great American writers concerned themselves with only a certain facet of cultural life or location--would John Irving's writing be as compelling if he substituted Texas for his beloved New England settings? His writing abilities would have still been admirable but can you make a story truly believable when you try to substitute the foreign for what you know best?
Lola said:
Lola, you are a good writer. As for Jhumpa Lahiri, while she is a lot better than so many south-asian american writers, she is nowhere near my top ten, twenty, heck even fifty list.
Thanks Lola and Melissa. I think your explanations provided me with what I was trying to understand - the minimalism you guys refer to. I guess I was coming from a perspective of say a Rushdie, who is undeniably a great writer but to an extent does write of things he is familiar with - Mumbai, Pakistan but things desi, but also in setting which may not be as unfamiliar like in The Ground Beneath her Feet or Arundhati Roy who wrote about Kerala. To me when I asked my question, it seemed like Lahiri was coming from a world which was even more restricted (or minimalist), but as you say if she can infuse the same depth to her characters and make it just as interesting, its all good. Just different styles.
Yes.
The best writers expand what they know.
but also in setting which may not be as familiar like in
It's always difficult to place contemporary writers in top tens and top twenties, because we have the whole of literary creation since year zero to cherish. Some of it will just be down to personal preference.
For me, she is one of the contemporary writers whose new work I most look forward to reading. This is just her third book. She's only just beginning, really.
OK.
So was Chekov a limited writer? What about DH Lawrence? Joyce only wrote about Dublin. Saul Bellow, Jewish American immigrant experience? Raymond Carver? How about Proust, who wrote about no other milieu than upper class Parisian society? Jane Austen was a limited writer?
I can go on, but the point I make is that if you describe these writers as limited, what you're really doing is describing your own understanding of literature and these writers as limited.
Please note, I'm not comparing the above writers stylistically with Jhumpa, just pointing out that a talented writer circling around and walking inside a world familiar, a loose and general but specific milieu, is not 'limited' in any way.
That's a very apt description of what Jhumpa Lahiri does at points in her writing.
The picture on the front cover of the book has caught my attention and I am wondering about it...What exactly does the "horseshoe" shaped thing floating in the flowing waters supposed to represent ? Is it some kind of broken bangle ? My take was that it signifies some kind of immigrants -experience something like "fresh off the boat" or "never-ending journey" ?
Any insights from those who have read the book ?
The cover image has to do with one of the stories (the last one) in the book.The bracelet belongs to Hema. I don't want to give away much more than than, but suffice it to say that once you've read it, it will make perfect sense.
The Bengali community in Cambridge is microscopic compared to, say, Brazilians in Cambridge. But more to the point, she repeats herself endlessly in subject, themes and style.
Until yesterday, not so much.
I'm intrigued by these stories in new settings. Let me read the book and get back to this.
I'm sure I'll check this out eventually, but is there a modern Indian writer out there who doesn't mainly write stories with such depressing themes? I'd like to feel refreshed and uplifted upon finishing a South Indian authored book, not weighed down and vaguely guilty about something I can't quite put my finger on.
It doesn't matter.
And besides, her imagination and characters do vary across place and time and even ethnicity, much more than some people admit.
These are allegations you can make about any writer. And they are not true in Jhumpa's case.
I'm most confused about the endless repetition of her style that you mention. What is style? What purpose does style serve? To what end? How does it develop? Over what kind of period, and over how many works does style progress or change? And how does Jhumpa's style relate to these questions? I don't think her technique or style is static, in the three works she has produced there is variation within that spacious miniaturism she displays.
These are questions that have to be asked of every writer when you criticise them for their style. I guess Jhumpa just isn't your preference, and that's fine. There are writers that I don't connect with, temperamentally. But I don't think your criticisms are entirely fair.
Don't you tire of Harry Potter 17? Or, more to Lahiri's point, Updike's five 'Rabbit' novels?
I'm glad there are people who find it fulfilling to obsess over small topics over many years. They should be hydrological engineers.
if you are in the habit of writing book reviews liberally sprinkled with terms like "evocative" and "thought-provoking" (in direct reference to specific sentences), I can understand the appreciation of 'variation within that spacious miniaturism' but to people who, like Manish, appreciate evolution along with references to past laurels, a more apt analogy would be "scraping the bong for resin in a vain attempt at reliving memories of smoking the good stuff."
Sandhyaji, this might seem like just a nit, and I know you're still new here as a blogger, but by general agreement (and FAQ entry), SM usage refers to the desh-born parents as the 'first generation', while the children of immigrants are the 'second generation'.
And also quite sensibly, a '1.5 generation' is also recognized!
I haven't read 'Unaccustomed Earth', but I generally agree with the idea that all novels and most short stories are just different versions of one's autobiography. But that said, the best authors are those who can link in universal themes, and plot memes, that many more people than just the author's own demographic niche can identify with. For example, Philip Roth has the same character, Nathan Zuckerman, in many of his novels going through different phases of life. His novels, although clearly written from the 2nd-and-later generation Jewish American point of view, nevertheless have many themes that I can identify with. If Jhumpa is able to do something like this, with recognizable Indian-American characters, or even the same character, but in different phases of life - in ways that people of other ethnicities can also identify with, that would be a way of 'expanding', in the Manish-ean sense.
chachaji: thanks for catching that typo, a result of my sometimes typing too fast and not being such a great numbers person :) all fixed. .
I found the stories in the "Interpreter of Maladies" kinda sad and depressing, her characters never seem to be happy, they are always angst ridden, having extra-marital affairs, worrying about fitting in etc. Is life really such a punishment for second generation desis? Just curious. How representative are her stories of the ABD experience?
>>her characters never seem to be happy, they are always angst ridden,
They are...confused.
Nevertheless, Jhumpa has found a niche for herself selling this worldview to a largely non-desi audience. Good for her. As for the rest of us...
M. Nam
Here's the cover from the Random House India edition.
I too second this question. The subject matter of most of Jhumpa Lahiri products ( not that I have read all of them ) seems to be melancholial or involves some kind of tragedy - family or cultural. I appreciate artistic creativity and emotional autobiography, but life is short and do I want to be crying and cribbing all the time during my recreational reading times ?
I meant meloncholiac @ 26 if that is right usage.
How about Vikram Chandra, especially with Sacred Games?
While he touches on a lot of things that could be depressing, and sometimes horrific (that extremely disturbing part at the end of the book about the woman in the pit), his protagonist, Sartaj Singh, a cop who's now hit middle age and who has, because of his line of work, seen a lot of the bad that people do, still manages to maintain a positive will to live and enjoy life, in spite of whatever disappointments he may experience from time to time.
I used to get so worked up about this topic, and now, I am all, "why?". So what if I read only a few stories in Interpreter of Maladies, or whatever, and have Namesake on my bookshelf, never read? If I'm not into it, I'm just not into it. It doesn't mean it's not good writing - I just don't care, that's all. For all I know, she will be remembered as an Edith Wharton, relating a specific world and it's specific culture.
*Anyway, some of the criticisms of Lahiri are silly. Jane Austen had a circumscribed world and when she went out of it in Mansfield Park, oh, the Austenites didn't like it! (Personally, I like Mansfield Park because I am more Bronte than Austen).
Maybe I will check the new book out, but not before I order 'Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day' from Persephone Books. Thanks Manish Vij and Ultrabrown! (Eh, ultrabrown reviewed the movie and I looked up the book......)
I did not read "The Namesake" because of my previous experience with Maladies but did see the movie.
I could not relate to Gogol and his wife at all, their identity crises left me cold.
I do think Jhumpa has a gift,she is very good with the language, her characters and their trials and tribulations on the other hand are not that interesting, especially after the tenth iteration of the basically the same story.
To be even more cryptic, I will paraphrase something I left on ultrabrown.
To paraphrase: Reading Doris Lessing, Golden Notebook, and that whole part where she goes into novels as philosophy verus novels as journalism?
Some people think Lahiri writes novels as journalism, which is okay, while others prefer novels as philosophy, and want more. That's how I interpret the argument, anyhoo.
Here is the Lessing quote as I think it applies to Lahiri and her critics/fans:
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.
The last thing Jhumpa's books are is journalism. Philosophical, yes.
I'm not taking sides. I am saying that is the disagreement between critics versus fans. Maybe she does have a philosphy, I don't know. It seems the critics think she is simply descriptive, while the fans say she is illuminating a little world.
Strange and invalid comparisons.
If you find her writing tiresome, that's your personal preference, but if personal tedium and tiresomeness is the sum total of any criticism to be made about literature, it doesn't progress any further than throwing out innapropriate comparisons and listing all those things we personally find tiresome and boring.
And as it happens, I haven't read any of John Updike's 'Rabbit' novels, but I understand that they do represent an important sequence in post war American fiction.
That's just facile.
Please explain the 'us' in 'the rest of us...'
On whose behalf are you speaking?
Which 'niche worldview' does Jhumpa sell? The 'niche worldview' called 'confusion'? Is confusion a worldview?
Your confusion has me confused.
I am curious about that too. I read a few stories in Interpreter of Maladies, and parts of The Namesake, and my reaction was: oh boy, am I glad to be born where and when and to whom I was.
As for a very funny modern Indian writer, try Ranjit Lal ("The Crow Chronicles", "The life and times of Altu-Faltu"). Certainly, this isn't ABD writing. Or even DBD writing, for that matter... but if you need a good laugh, and intelligent, layered writing...
8 · Manish Vij said
Excellent point Manish, and one on which I agree. I think, though, that Lahiri has the potential to do just that. Certainly in some of her writing she's ventured ever so slightly away from her center, and I think when she's done that it's been just as good. I wish I had Interpreter of Maladies in front of me so that I could be more specific, but in at least two of her short stories she's created characters who don't fit the mold of the ABCBengali, so to speak. The title story, at the very least, takes us away from New England, and in Sexy she creates the non-Indian character quite well, I thought. I think ten or fifteen years from now we'll be able to more accurately debate whether or not she's expanded her base at all, once she has a few more volumes under her belt.
The discussion seems to have veered more along the lines of 'is she or isn't she' any good. What I like about her writing is how well she draws the reader in and creates a character. I like her writing, of course, but it's certainly valid for others not to.
... is there a modern Indian writer out there who doesn't mainly write stories with such depressing themes?
I've always enjoyed Abha Dawesar.
Sakshi and others:
Actually, that is what bothered me about most of her writings thus far. I felt like her ABD characters were flat (Gogol was such a snore and sans personality) and whiny about their Indian American experience. Everyone has conflicts, but her emphasis on struggles of ethnicity leave out those who have actually dealt with it and moved on (of course one can argue you never move on). For example, I went to an all white school and dealt with identity in college. Then I moved on to doing things that I thought would have an impact in my life and the lives of others- but thats just me. I know hundreds of other ABDs who have had similar struggles but eventually came to terms with it and found that life exists outside the boundaries of ethnic identity. She just harps on it so much, its annoying when random people think they understand the ABD experience through her work.
In defense of Jhumpa and her small minded Bengali world.
"Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves. That’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives, experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.
Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories, each time in a new disguiseòmaybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Also her DBDs are too traditional, they seem to be comfortable only with their subset (in this Bengali) of Indians, while this is true of some older gen DBDs I have meet plenty of DBD's who came to the US in the 70's and before, who are very much at home in their adopted homeland and have friends other than their sub-group in India and who found all that emphasis on tradition in India quite suffocating.
I find her characters stereotypical and hence boring and her stories repetitious.
should read ABDs, sorry for the typo
I'm with Lola - all this discussion of "expanding beyond her base" and "what she knows" is ridiculous. If you like authors who can write all styles and all people and perspectives, that's your preference. It's certainly fine to not like Lahiri - there's no rule saying you have to like her style. Feel free to dislike or just ignore her! Sometimes her stories are a little too precious for me, and I generally like her stuff. But don't presume to call your preference some objective critique of literary quality. Tolstoy wrote about Russian aristocrats, Jane Austen wrote about British upper-middle class marriage-aged women, John Cheever wrote about wealthy depressed New England families, Faulkner wrote about poor white families in the South (and once - in the 3rd person - a black man in GoDown Moses). I'm hardly making the point that she's in the same category of these giants (although I enjoy her way more than Cheever!) but whether or not you think she is or not, has nothing to do with the settings and contexts of her stories.
I also hate to devolve into this kind of thing and echo sensationalist book reviewers have written, but I do think if she were white she wouldn't be getting this kind of question. There are so many other authors who write about Boston specifically all the time (Dennis Lehane leaps to mind) who don't have to deal with stuff like this. He writes exclusively about white people - poor ones, in South Boston - and no seems to mind his "lack of range". I think Lahiri stretches admirably.
But hey, you don't have to agree! But just say you don't like her writing.
>>just say you don't like her writing.
I like her writing. The subject/topic and the characters don't connect with me.
M. Nam
The greatest short story writers have been ones that explored a rather narrow milieu -- that "limitation" is central to what short fiction is all about. Tugenev, Hawthorne, Poe, Joyce, Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Updike, William Trevor all focused on very specific cultures and slices of a larger society without being criticized for it. Indeed even the big gun novelists like Faulkner and Hemingway wrote from very specific milieux, and that was what made them great. Hemingway bounced around from France to Spain to Africa to Cuba, but he created the same sense of place in all of them, and those places are more similar than different. Nearly all of Faulkner's work is set in one Mississippi county.
Jhumpa is definitely old school. Her style has more in common with classic short fiction than the experimental stuff that flowed from Grace Paley to Donald Barthelme to Gordon Lish -- and which dominated writing programs from the 1980s until today.
I respect and admire her work more than I like it, which is to say I recognize her great skill at her craft, though I am less interested in the milieu.
It's pretty clear that people feel strongly, one way or another about Lahiri's work. It'll be interesting to see how thoughts and opinions evolve or change the same *after* having read the book (for those who choose to read it). One thing I do want to emphasize is that though her characters in Unaccustomed Earth are Indian-American, identity issues are not the focus of any of the stories in this collection. These are really stories about love, marriage, being a parent, being a child of elderly parents, about responsibility, etc. with characters who happen to be Indian-American, and specifically Bengali.
And, as I write this: I can't help but wonder: what would folks be saying here if Jhumpa had written a book in which none of the characters were Indian-American? :)
I would like much more if she moved "forward" a little, even if she keeps it Bengali. How about a tale about a laid-off Bengali sw engineer who takes the day-bus to Atlantic city surrounded by elderly Chinese retirees?
Exactly, exactly, Sandhaya. I think, if she did, all of a sudden people might compare her more directly with white writers - Updike, Didion or whoever. And people might "finally see the true beauty of her work." Or, they might decide that "she was all right when she was talking about her own brown people...but is she really good enough to write about whites?" :/
I remember reading a review of Vikram Seth's "An Equal Music" (entirely about white people) that was pretty much those words. I couldn't believe it.
You know, all this is just a waste of time :)
What we need is a "sentence-off". PAGING ANNA - new 55 type excercise!
Play your favorite Lahiri sentence of the favorite sentence of another writer. Come on! It's not about being comparable or anything - it's just about appreciating beautiful writing.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged........" Austen vs. "????????" Lahiri (I haven't read enough to know what I would put).
(I'm just having fun with this. I have no strong opinions one way or the other, and the more I think about it, the more I think I have been wrong about Lahiri. I sort of hate talking about a writer, though, without reading excerpts or examples of their work. Why do so many book reviews do so little of that? It's my pet peeve. How do I know if I wanna read the book if you don't put out the sentences as enticement, eh?)
To those asking about how these books compare to the real ABD experience: I'm a 1.5-gen Indian (essentially an ABD with an Indian passport until college) and I really didn't feel that most of these stories that I've read describe the experiences of my family or friends at all. They tend to focus on what's lost by leaving India, instead of what's potentially gained by moving to "the land of opportunities". There will always be struggles when moving to a new country--my parents still struggle to integrate in some aspects of western culture, though we've been here for nearly 25 years. (I went abroad for a couple of years, too--not to India--but I definitely understand the plight of the immigrant far better now.) But though I regret only having marginal ties to and knowledge of India, I feel like being here has opened up many opportunities and possibilities for us that may not have been as readily available if we hadn't come here.
And okay, Lahiri did write "The Third and Final Continent" in Interpreter of Maladies, which I found really uplifting and moving. I haven't seen another story like it, though.
It doesn't really bother me that her themes might be narrow, or that her subjects lead extremely ordinary lives. You can write great books on these topics. But I just don't like her writing style. It is almost clinical in its descriptions of scenes (one that sticks in my memory is when Gogol and Moushumi are sharing an orange after they make love on their first date at her place - the detailed description of how Moushumi was feeding Gogol wedges of the blood-red something-or-the-other orange did not omit a single detail of the room's furnishings) and misses out on evoking the more important emotional impact at the expense of details. Now her airless prose might actually be a calculated strategy to magnify the suffocating nature of her protagonists' lives, but it doesn't work for me.
i wasn't a big fan of interpreter of maladies, but then i read the short story upon which the namesake was based upon, and it was quite good - the focus being more on the father and his tie to gogol, rather than on the son's ABD woes. to me, something went wrong when lahiri expanded the short story into the novel, as if she just lost the energy to properly convey emotions beyond that one scenario. i read another one of her short stories in the new yorker's latest fiction issue, but seeing as how i only liked one out of many in the interpreter, i'll probably hold off on buying...
for anybody interested - i just saw a 20% off display at b&n...
wtf? ridiculous. i remember reading golden gate a while back and it was both powerful and mostly (exclusively?) about non-desis...and although a suitable boy was mainly about indians, some of the best bits had to do with non-indians.AK _ welcome back. Been wondering where you had been.
It would be interesting to hear the opinions of men who do not read chick lit.
OK, are those peeved at JH's narrow scope frustrated by the lack of curiosity , of the new world, exhibited by her protagonists?
And do you think if she is to write honestly about these folks that's what she has to work with?
melbourne - thanks! that thing called work has prevented me from doing the more important things, like post a comment at SM :) good to know i've actually been missed
From the article posted in the news tab
Aren't majority of the Indian-Americans considered to be the wealthiest immigrants in America ? So she caters to her crowd. But with increased globalization and more interconnected world I wonder how would the new generation of less-American more global Indian-Americans be characterized in her books in future.
And am I the only one who feels that the "traditional" Indians being depicted in her books seems very cliched and hardly realistic in many cases ? And as if all Indian-Americans had one hell of an angst ridden childhood/growing up.
In response to several comments: Why does her writing have to reflect all these different aspects about "Indian culture." It's self-evident you can't encapsulate all the nuances and diversity of South Asian culture in one book/story, etc., yet we're expecting her to be the poster child for Indian culture. She writes what inspires her, which may have nothing to do with the aspects of South Asian culture that several of us experienced, yet her writing and her stories are still moving. Aren't we helping marginalize South Asian culture by expecting any work by any South Asian to be the ideal representation of what is "South Asian?" Like Beyonce is supposed to represent ALL black people. Right.
And, as I write this: I can't help but wonder: what would folks be saying here if Jhumpa had written a book in which none of the characters were Indian-American? :)
Actually, I'm most eager to read "Nobody's Business."
I dread reading Jhumpa Lahiri. I felt like her work should be a mirror of life as I know it - but wasn't...instead, I found myself drowning after being pulled into a looking glass. I'm both afraid that she's captured what I know and reflected back perfectly...and that she hasn't captured it, not at all.
Even though I don't care for her writing style, it's what keeps me going back for more.
fyi, for Chicago folks, she will be at a Women and Children First Bookstore event in Andersonville on April 8th. You need a ticket though, so call first to reserve a spot (and a book).
Jhumpa Lahiri is quite the bore. I fell asleep after reading 3-4 pages of one of her short stories. She and Salman Rushdie should not write any type of short story or novel.
I like reading about things I only imagine about so I am going to be honest here.
I think that this book is going to be like some bubble gum Indian story that we all have seen and lived through, but the simple words were replaced with more fancy ones from a thesaurus.
i'm still waiting for arundhati to stop caring about the world for a year and write a novel. anyone else?
Strange and invalid comparisons.
She makes the Updike comparison herself in the NY Mag i/v.
That's just facile.
That's snark.
I felt like her ABD characters were flat
Up til now she's focused on the 1st gen. That's where she comes alive.
don't presume to call your preference some objective critique of literary quality.
It's a critique of repetitiveness.
just say you don't like her writing.
I liked her story just fine the first time. But I'm not compelled to read it again :)
Btw, though she is a competent writer, she is a monotonous public speaker. Her publicist needs to buy her Toastmasters lessons.
what would folks be saying here if Jhumpa had written a book in which none of the characters were Indian-American?
The same as for 'My Revolutions,' which is, 'Gee, I really should read that sometime' :)
It is almost clinical in its descriptions of scenes
It is like the segment in Fight Club where names of IKEA sets annotate the scene.
She and Salman Rushdie should not write any type of short story or novel.
Odd to lump these together. Rushdie is her opposite.
i'm still waiting for arundhati to stop caring about the world for a year and write a novel.
Stop teasing me.
I just want to know did anyone actually finish "A Suitable Boy"?
Can we get a poll here.
I strongly feel that she is an utter sell-out. The only way she'd amount to anything is if she wrote in pure Bengali with a Feather Quill, all the while sat on the floor, and signed her name Nilanjana Sudeshna at the end of it. Jhumpa is her slave name and I'm offended; all Indians are.
UMM, you sellout. Everyone knows real Bongs only write JNU textbooks or Rabindra sangeet.
I'd strongly recommend Kiran Desai! The Inheritance of Loss is a very, very good book, but I also loved the extremely clever and funny Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
I don't quite like Anita Desai or, for that matter, Vikram Chandra (IMHO, a very mediocre writer).
Just a snippet for those seeking samples from the story as enticement. The opening of "Nobody's Business":
(No, this story is not really about all the blind dates that Sang goes on.)
Funny books: Hullabaloo definitely put a smile on my face, as did No Onions Nor Garlic, by Srividya Natarajan, which I recently picked up in India (I don't think it's available here).
When JL first came on the scene, she seemed so exciting: young, great jacket photo, lots of promise, New Yorker exposure, and interesting stories about East Coast Bengalis with all sorts of repressed things going on. Now it's not quite as fun. The New Yorker stories continue to appear, but the glamour is gone (her stories, anyway, are the antithesis of glamour) and the Bengalis keep on repressing and releasing their emotions (and eating fish). Part of the problem must be the medium. At a certain point, doesn't she have to move onto The Great Bengali Cambridge Novel? The Namesake doesn't count -- it's like a long short story in its scope and tone. It's very difficult to achieve greatness in the short story format -- I can think only of Borges and Kafka (in my stubborn opinion).
Actually I myself really liked 'The Interpreter of Maladies' but somehow I couldn't connect with 'The Namesake'. One of the above comments was right: her writing is too clinical. My mother, a DBD, loved 'The Namesake'. Although I think it's unfair to expect her to encapsulate the whole 'ímmigrant experience' into one novel, since everybody has different experiences. I can't comment on the real life of ABD's vs. the novel, since I didn't grow up in the States and my time on this site taught me that there is even quite a difference between ABDs and EBDs(European Born Desis). Hey, maybe I should write a book...;)
Dubliners by Joyce is one of my favorite collections of short stories. The short story is a great place to showcase the disciplined, muscular, spare style of writing that I most appreciate.
Thanks for pointing that out, Manish. It also just struck me that if she were a true Bong, she would have spat on that Pulitzer Prize Medal and thrown it back at the Columbia University Conceiterati; since when does a real Bong need validation from the West? Everyone knows that the Howrah Bridge was built without using a single nut or bolt. But, how many of us are privy to the riveting bit of information that all that metal came from disdainfully melting western accolades?
After all this time on SM, I have to say that I do heart Americanese, but, why do I get the feeling that Jhumpaji didn't mean it like that?After all this time on SM, I have to say that I do heart Americanese, but, why do I get the feeling that Jhumpaji didn't mean it like that?
oops, "heard"!
i need to slow down my typing speed or start catching my typos. thanks for the sharp eye.
Thanks sandhya!
Unfortunately, that snippet now makes me not want to read the book. Oh, she's good, allright. I have changed my mind, a bit! What do you know? It's got a quiteness, hasn't it? I can see that now. I can see the charm of quietness.
Just having fun:
From time to time a man would call for Sang, wanting to marry her. Or, more properly, curious if she were someone he could marry. Calls at all hours, odd little messages left, hushed and rushed voices, saying they wanted to meet her. Where did they get the number? Friends, families, aunties, uncles - the usual crowd. She was young and pretty and smart and Bengali, said the usual crowd. So, calls at all hours, odd little messages left, and hurried snippets of conversation, full of odd claims about her: she was at Harvard, she was at Columbia, hadn't she gone to NYU? Sangeeta, they called her, and Sang didn't correct them. Why would she? She would see them once, and then never again.
Well, maybe she's, um, different? Individuality. What a concept!
UMM, though the Howrah may be made of melted-down Nobels, Kolkata's jinrickshaws run on outrage :)
Sorry she's just a superficial writer. There is some distance between the author and the reader in her style. It's like she made a pretty thing, which should be appreciated, but not touched. This veneer like many other writers is plastic on couches in formal living rooms, uncomfortable and awkward to sit on and hopelessly sad when the rooms are empty and unused.
Great writing to me interacts with the reader, makes them fall into traps and holes, go places not considered.
70 · sandhya said
This snippet is an example of what I don't like about Jhumpa's writing. She throws everything into the lines, almost as if she does not trust the reader to read between them. Every little detail of how Sangeeta feels, thinks; even the color of her eyes and how they vary, is cataloged in lieu of a possibly subtler telling, of the kind that Margaret Atwood is so good at.
Maybe Jhumpa is a believer in the James Brooks school of filmmaking, which substitutes the tedious process of character development with the device of the revelatory scene where the protagonist blurts out their pent-up feelings towards themselves, other characters, and the world at large, in one long monologue which then leaves everybody else initially shellshocked, and ultimately repentant. Life lessons are taught, not learnt, in this world.
Here's a really, really dull excerpt.
And a better one, though it involves (of course) food.
And more interesting reviews.
Manish, do you run on outrage too?
A good interview appears in Book Forum, which answers specific questions about the individual stories in Unaccustomed Earth.
Two tid-bits:
JL: Yes, I think it’s the same general stockpot [laughs]. Some bits and pieces are taken from my own parents and other parents that I knew growing up. And sometimes they’re totally invented. The thing I took for granted when I was growing up is that I was living in a world within a world. It was a tight world, but I knew a lot of people and was privy to the whole spectrum of types and personalities and characters. To me, they don’t represent immigrants or anyone specific. They just represent the human condition.
BF: Drinking appears in several of these stories to different effects: In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a man gets drunk at the wedding of a woman he once loved, which loosens his reserve enough for him to reveal marital frustrations to a female guest, before he passes out; “Only Goodness” introduces a man struggling with alcoholism. And in “Once in a Lifetime,” Hema’s parents are at once astonished and disturbed by their old friends’ new love for Johnnie Walker. What does it mean for your characters to drink?
JL: I realized after I put the book together that there was a lot of drinking in it. There were people who drank and people who didn’t, and there was this sort of moral judgment on both sides because drinking is a Western custom. In the West, most people drink—it’s part of the culture, regardless of class. Alcohol is not a part of life among average lower-middle-class or middle-class people in India. In “Only Goodness,” it really is a story about alcohol—well, alcoholism isn’t ever really about the alcohol, of course, but about this man struggling with alcohol in a very obvious way, whereas I think Amit [from “A Choice of Accommodations”], naturally there would be a lot to drink at a wedding, and it just made sense to me that he would have one too many.
What do people have to say about the latter response?
Is that bit about alcohol not being a part of life among average lower-middle-class or middle-class Indians true? My mom, whenever the subject of drinking comes up, never fails to gripe about how obscenely drunk men back in India used to get when alcohol was available...
re class - i'm not sure that there is much of a difference, except to the extent that some cannot afford a frivolity such as alcohol (but even then, there is a huge range amongst local varieties to satisfy). though, i guess there is one more difference as far as the general attitude/taboo of the different classes go. bar culture is pretty popular in a range of forms...
Jhumpa on the cover of the Improper Bostonian.
A very entertaining, bitchy review.
A fawning one.
You know I do. Kiss kiss.
Manish, are you a celeb?
There are pretty strong taboos against drinking in some classes
in India. However, I have a feeling these are weakening,especially
in urban India. An example of such taboos, is the imposition of
prohibition in Andhra Pradesh in the early 90's due to a village
based anti alcohol movement.
Air-kissing? Very Bombay.
Manish, are you setting yourself up as the anti-Jhumpa? Is there a novel in the works in which that pithy, cutting wit'll be deployed? Here's what I'm seeing: Vij in bold authorial print (though, of course, in a smaller font than the title), and coverart which camouflages the Indianness of the novel. Is that what you went to Bombay for? Field research?
90 · Jhumpa's foil? said
... pithy, cutting hyperlinked wit'll ...
80 · Rahul on April 3, 2008 02:04 PM · Direct link · “Quote”(?)
"This snippet is an example of what I don't like about Jhumpa's writing."
That's it! I am writing you out of my will. My priceless Eliot collection now goes to my 15-year old even if she says "T.S. who?" upon discovering her unearned wealth.
In the average Indian village or small town, alcohol is not kept in the house or served to guests or drunk at dinner time. People who drink alcohol like that are considered of "low character". However, MEN do get drunk and it's on the downlow, not sitting around the dinner table sharing a glass of red with the wife.
Some Indian towns and villages have made alcohol illegal on the insistence of women who suffer abuse from drunk husbands. I remember reading about that several times in the Indian newspapers back home.
Perhaps if it was not such a social taboo, and wine or beer or whatever was considered an acceptable drink to share with one's female family members during a meal, things would be different.
Again, gender issues.
Mom, get off the Internet!
That was my excuse for research of the starlet variety :)
So here's the list:
Lit: Jhumpa
Music: Norah
Telly: Padma
Biz: Indra
Space: Sunita
.....and??
#5 on Amazon.
..and what's with this amazonian psychocoercion?
"Customer who bought this item also bought"
followed by..
"What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?"
followed by..
"So You'd Like to... "
95 · Neale said
.....and??
Comedy: Vijai
Spelling: Nupur
Politics: Swati
Porn: Sunny
18 · Manish Vij said
Oye! What have you got against hydrological engineers? Hydrology isn't a small topic. :)
She is the only person who makes me cry on a repeated basis and yet I keep coming back for more. Thanks Jhumpa for this beautiful collection. And thanks to Sandhya for the review. :0)
But you know, hey, some did. :) And to us it's not cliched. Perhaps there's a generational difference here - I'm not quite as old as Jhumpa but getting there...and the Indian community was a lot smaller in our childhoods...it's not like now where you have all these huge parties (at least in major cities) from childhood through college. It wouldn't surprise me if a 20-25-year-old (don't know how old you are, just using this as an example), especially in Cal or New York, would have trouble relating to the upbringing of a 40-year-old like Jhumpa.
92 · Floridian said
Floridian! Surely somebody as classy as you realizes that a shared appreciation of Bogart and Eliot over cognac and canapes trumps a divergence in opinions about writing that reeks faintly of the dolorous word soup that used to pass for short fiction in the pages of Femina and Women's Era?
- Missionary-educated-child-of-Macaulay wannabe