Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Book Reviews of Unaccustomed Earth
Book Review: Deja Vu Anybody?
Summary: 2 Stars
Don't get me wrong--I think Jhumpa Lahiri has a way with words and telling stories as was evident in her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. Interpreter was like a breath of fresh air with short stories that truly helped a reader transcend to human reaches of pain, joy, disappointment, hope and many other emotions. I think that the writer is great at short stories, horrid at the long novel (I was tremendously let down with The Namesake) but needs to change up the formula.
I was excited that Jhumpa Lahiri was coming out with a book of short stories again but upon reading the first few stories, I was nothing short of crestfallen. Although the stories themselves are not written badly, I am getting really tired of the same old formula she's using. It seems like almost every one of her stories revolves around Boston, involves an American-born Indian struggling with either their own culture or a family member, and of course involves Indian parents and their struggle coming to America. OK I get it already!
These stories didn't provide any new insight, I felt, that she didn't already communicate to me with Interpreter of Maladies. I ended up getting really bored and tired of her always leaving stories hanging with no resolution in sight. Some of the stories almost seemed pointless (the last one in the book is a prime example) to even write. After writing about having such emotion and turning around and completely ignoring that emotion just to have the character regret seems so tiresome, trite and overdone in her books.
The writer is obviously talented and I am not knocking on her ability to write mellifluously--however her stories need a breath of fresh air so I don't feel like I'm reading the same story that has been slightly altered 10X.
Book Review: Offers the Reader an Enticing Window.
Summary: 4 Stars
I finished reading "Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri in about four days. To me, that's the first hallmark of a good book--that you want to keep on reading it.
One reason I was so motivated to keep on reading was that Lahiri writes such accessible characters. They grapple with issues we all do (parents not understanding you when you're young, the death of a parent, etc.). Lahiri's characters in this book are as human and flawed as the rest of us, in spite of (or maybe because of) the pressure put on them to be so successful.
Lahiri gives many of us a window into what it's like to grow up Indian in America. I like the way that she adds details about Indian culture, foods, etc., but not to the extent that it alienates or makes the story inaccessible to someone of non-Indian background like myself.
Her writing style, at least to me, seems basic in that it's not cluttered with a lot of florid adjectives and description. Yet the characters' stories still come across as real. She gets to the essence of these characters and leaves out what is unnecessary.
In reading some of the previous reviews, I do agree that Lahiri should try extending her range by writing about Indian or Indian-American characters outside of the highly educated class that seems to be a hallmark of her stories so far. While her stories do show a certain degree of variety and uniqueness, there is always the danger of producing stories of a uniform sameness if she's not careful.
Overall though, I definitely recommend this book, as well as her earlier "Interpreter of Maladies" collection.
Book Review: Unaccustomed praise?
Summary: 3 Stars
...not by today's standards! I have read this author's earlier work and actually enjoyed some of the stories in her collection from a few years back. But deserving of a Pulitzer? In all fairness, I must say that it seems as though one must now be ethnic and from a Third World country to get any literary recognition in this fair United States these days. I'd say this might be a good thing if these writers were really coming from difficulty and struggle. But that is not the case with these ethnic immigrant writers of today. If one is as privileged as Ms. Lahiri has been, (and there are many), you will go to the correct top tier Ivy League schools, which will give you correct entry to the publishing circle elite. Let me just say that I welcome varied experience; I am all for different perspectives-but what's missing here is the grit of life. We can't help but see that Lahiri's dramas are rather predictable, shallow and simply not constituting the very stuff of which great fiction is made.
To wit: the greatest writers, to me, never entered an MFA program or Ivy League type of school. I think this is true today as any. Could you imagine Henry Miller, Mark Twain, Dickenson, Gogol, Austen, Whitman, George Eliot et al, coming out of the precious Iowa School or any other assortment of MFA programs? I think not. What constitutes such a lustrous and exquisite rendering of life is life itself. And those great writers lived it. Sad to say this no longer seems to be the case. And our expectations are so lowered as a result of it.
Book Review: Simply hypnotic...She will drag you into the rain...
Summary: 5 Stars
The Unaccustomed Earth is impossible to stop reading because:
1. Ms. Lahiri's short stories NEVER feel like short stories. They never feel fleeting or unsubstantial. They simply abduct you the way a 500 page novel can. Each tale is deceptively powerful...like shots of Tequila, and it only takes a few pages before you're reeling and forgetting your surroundings because you're suddenly transported to a garden in Seattle or at a wedding reception in the pouring rain.
2. And she will drag you into that rain...
3. And her characters are not the characters floating in the mind of a writer. They're not generic or vaporous or sewn together with the usual stale adjectives. You can't see the seams on these characters. You can't see where they begin or end because they don't begin and they don't end. When you meet them they're as alive as anyone you know and when you leave them at the end of a story, they go on without you, into rooms, into cars, into planes. They inhabit the world.
4. And there are families and they are all tangled up, destroyed, yearning, redeeming, hating, aching, and not once, not for a single second did I pause when I was reading The Unaccusomed Earth and think, I don't really believe this or I knew that would happen...
5. Ms. Lahiri's imagination is ferocious, stealthy, as endless as the ocean. You float into it because it's so smooth and effortless and then suddenly, deliberately, it's engulfed you.
Book Review: Variations on a theme
Summary: 4 Stars
As a Bengali-American from New England I always find it fascinating to read in Ms Lahiri's books what could be versions of my life (especially The Namesake"). However when I read fiction I'm not necessarily looking to relate to each and every character or event, I'm looking to be transported into the author's imagination. I loved "Interpreter of Maladies" not only because I love Ms Lahiri's precise and elegant writing style but also because in those stories the characters were diverse both biographically and geographically. In Unaccustomed Earth Ms Lahiri has cast a much narrower net and come up with a set of characters who could have all known each other, met at the same Puja and been part of the same adda group, their spheres of existence overlap so much.
On a separate note I do sense a certain disdain for the zero-generation, where the wives are completely taken up with home and hearth, blinkered from being a part of broader American society, never as career women or activists. And where the men are always in a state of "irritated resignation" with their wives and offspring. Though that might be more to do with the contraints of a short story, the resulting chasm between the zero and first generations becomes inevitable. If this book were a music album it would be variations on a theme all written in the same key. Beautiful but ultimately leaving the listener wishing desperately for a change of key, tempo and instrumentation.