Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $2.55 You Save: $22.45 (90%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Unaccustomed Earth
Book Review: A writer's workbook
Summary: 5 Stars
Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer's writer. These stories are very romantic about missed loves. She uses stream of consciousness, changes of point of view, description, storytelling, and other writing techniques very well. I am amazed at her style.
She writes what she knows. She is a Bengali immigrant. Her characters and stories reflect that heritage. Her stories contain culture but are not limited to the culture. She is describing the human condition that is universal to all: A father who is trying to make a new life and trying to make up to a daughter for past ills; a flat-mate who falls in love with another but dares not express that love; parents that set unrealistic standards for their children. The situations are real and universal. I learn about the Bengali people but I also learn about life through her writing.
I was expecting a full novel instead of short stories in the first part of the book and a novella in the second part. She writes about the different garments and dishes but explain them well. Her purpose is not to do that. Her purpose is to tell the story and detailed descriptions of the foods and garments would distract. The reader can always go to Google for more detailed information.
The book kept my focus. A good read as they say. But more importantly for me, I found myself smiling at the style and techniques in admiration and jealousy.
Book Review: Accustomed to Success - A Fine Collection of Eight Short Stories
Summary: 5 Stars
With UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Jhumpa Lahiri can lay claim with good reason to being the finest short story writer in America today. This book, her second collection of short stories with the full-length novel THE NAMESAKE sandwiched between, is a masterful collection of affecting tales about family life and individual self-discovery. While Lahiri's focus is relentlessly drawn toward what might be termed the "Bengali-American experience," her stories express rich underlying elements of universality, allowing them to transcend the mere "new American immigrant" genre. She shows yet again that she is a marvelous craftswoman of the short story art form and its language (words, imagery, and symbolism).
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH is eight stories, divided into two sections. The first section contains five distinct short stories, beginning with the near-novella length title story that is certainly the collection's finest. In that piece, a daughter of Indian descent, Ruma, welcomes her unexpectedly widowered father with trepidation to her new home in Seattle. Ruma is married to a Caucasian named Adam, and they have a young son named Akash. In every respect the young family is a model of mixed marriage and, in Ruma's case, full cultural assimilation. Nevertheless, her father's visit promises to force Ruma to confront the inevitable fissures that appear between first and second generation immigrant families. Travel to new countries or settling into new lands, postcards of foreign places, the soil in gardening, and measurement of distances all serve in symbolic support to the story's title, but it is a simple misplaced and unmailed postcard that pulls everything together into a poignant ending.
Lahiri's other four stories in the first section have similar themes. In "Hell-Heaven," a young woman recalls her childhood when a fellow Bengali became a family friend and part of her (and, surprisingly, her mother's) life. In "A Choice of Accommodation," (another title laden with multiple meanings), a middle-aged, mixed marriage couple (Amit and Megan) rediscover themselves and a bit of their previously unstated history during a friend's wedding held at Amit's old boarding school. In "Only Goodness," a model Bengali daughter named Sudha, married and a new mother, tries to cope with her younger brother Rahul's alcoholic failings and her likely role in making him what he has become. Of all the characters in this book, it is Rahul who comes across most powerfully.
The second part of the book contains three intertwined stories involving two characters, one female and one male, at different stages of their lives. Hema and Kaushik are first thrown together by circumstances of the latter's parents having relocated to India and then returned to the Boston area. Hema's family agrees to put Kaushik's family up until they can find a new house of their own, turning Hema's life upside down and even tossing her from her bedroom (now occupied by the three-year-older Kaushik) and onto a cot in her parents room. Tragedy looms behind these events, but it is one which Hema's family is not aware. The first story is told from Hema's viewpoint, the second about three years later from Kaushik's, and the third about twenty years later from both viewpoints. As with her opening story "Unaccustomed Earth," Lahiri finds an ending that, while somewhat contrived, is nonetheless touching.
It is only in this final piece, "Going Ashore" (again a title with multiple meanings), that Lahiri brings her narratives into the present day. The earlier stories appear to take place mostly in about the 1980's, with references to VCR's and record players and telephones with long extension cords. They seem oddly removed from everyday reality, as if they represented a sort of wistful backward stare at a different era, to a time when America was still a shining light on a hill and India was a place to escape before the Internet age and globalization changed some of the balance in their relationship. By the time of "Going Ashore," both Hema and Kaushik are adrift in global waters, world citizens who travel freely, lack strong personal attachments, and exist without the roots of family and place and culture that those of the prior generation clearly demonstrated in the earlier stories. Even their careers are disassociative: Hema's as a researcher of the ancient Etruscan civilization, Kaushik's as a photographer of world events who stands forever outside the very events whose images he captures.
If I had one criticism of UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, it would be Lahiri's seemingly incessant focus on one group of Bengalis, the academically-striving, economically prosperous, high achievers. Story after story expresses variations on the same themes from among the same types of people. Lahiri offers repeated mixed marriages (Ruma and Adam, Pranab and Deborah, Amit and Megan, Sudha and Roger Featherstone, Rahul and Elena). Nearly everyone is a PhD - perhaps that is what makes Rahul and Kaushik seem so refreshingly real - and everyone is an academic overachiever whose alma maters would make even US News & World Report blush - Princeton, MIT, Radcliffe, Harvard Medical School, Columbia, U Penn, London School of Economics, Cornell, NYU, Bryn Mawr, Tufts, Colgate, Swarthmore. One character has actually been slumming as a physics professor at Michigan State, but thankfully he's finally on his way to the more acceptable MIT. There must be other Bengalis in America worth writing about, and there must be other stories that do not lead one to paraphrase Tolstoy with, "Every happy Bengali family is alike, and every unhappy Bengali family is also unhappy in the same way."
Here's hoping that Ms. Lahiri can apply her brilliant writing skills (...clusters of swallows like giant thumbprints swiping the sky...") to a broader canvas in future works; the results promise to be stunning. In the meantime, be pleased as a reader to sit quietly and relish a master at work in these eight compelling and emotionally satisfying short stories. They are well worth the time.
Book Review: Amazing Stories
Summary: 5 Stars
Each of the stories deals with acculturation and relationships, and each stands out as a character study of how people find their way when faced with conflicting values and loyalties. Some of the stories took my breath away, particularly the last 3, which are interwoven.I found myself thinking of these characters long after I finished the book.Book Review: Another Great Collection of Stories from Lahiri
Summary: 5 Stars
It's refreshing to anxiously anticipate each of Lahiri's books and be so completely fulfilled by the product. Each of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth evokes new and refreshing insight into the human condition.Book Review: Another great book by Lahiri
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes, we've been here before, as one reviewer says. But "predictable", NO. Lahiri writes about Bengalis who have left their country to raise their families in the US. The themes are recurring, some of the characters are similar and have similar experiences. You get the feeling that many of them probably know each other. But the characters are full-bodied and their stories have all of the immediacy and unexpected turns of real life. (The second generation gets a few surprises from their parents in this collection.) Her pitch-perfect word choice is enough to keep me reading. Just as when I finished her other books, I want more!