Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

[ColeS]

I read Jhumpa Lahiri's THE NAMESAKE and INTERPRETER OF MALADIES; but by far, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH is my favorite. Reading that right now.

Anyone read any of those?

What I liked about The Namesake is probably what I like about UE, and then a little more. She has a way of using these stories to take you into the heart and mind of an immigrant who I believe has no ties to any country (or earth). An immigrant looses touch and ties to his/her land of birth but will never be able to create a strong and lasting root to his/her new country/earth either. There is a forever tug of war and once you have conceded to that notion, for the rest of your life you will always be somewhere in the middle waiting for acceptance from either ends.

I think Jumpha Lahiri takes you into the hearts and minds of the immigrant while using their simple everyday life and life story to regenerate familiarities with your own.

Her stories tug at your heart. Really. And what great writing!

[Gen]

Re: Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

I read the namesake, will need to get the others.

[ColeS]

Re: Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

Forgot to add the review from BN.Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer who knows her strengths. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, her novel The Namesake, and this collection, Unaccustomed Earth, she has taken what would seem a narrow slice of the immigrant narrative and sent it sprawling. The characters that populate Lahiri's fiction tend to be of a type; more often than not, they are second-generation Indian immigrants, the children of middle-class Bengalis striving to remake themselves as middle-class Americans. Unaccustomed Earth is, in this sense, not a departure. Its eight stories find Lahiri retreading this familiar ground yet also staking out new territory -- the difficult landscape of American adulthood.

(AND.....)


Knopf Canada is proud to welcome this bestselling, Pulitzer Prize—winning author with eight dazzling stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden–where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a couple’s romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories–a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fate–we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

[ColeS]

Re: Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

What did you think of The Namesake?

I listened to it on audio. Had a long drive one day and finished it round trip. I was hooked! I still wonder though if I would have felt the same way if I had read it.

Fascinating story though.

Interpreter of Maladies was her debut book and is much like Unaccustomed earth - short stories.

[kia027]

Re: Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

just caught up on Jumpha Lahiri's books

I like how they take you into the center of ordinary days of her characters and through time. Reading through the cultural struggles of the american born children it seems they assimilated better than I had assumed