Great Book! A good follow up to The Namesake, although not quite as gripping as Interpreter of the Maladies. The set of unconnected stories has Lahiri's famous Indian originated complex charcters who don't ever really belong anywhere. She does a great job of helping viewers see these imperfect people strive to achieve a balance in their lives. My favorite is last set of stories connecting Hema and Kaushik. Their lives from each one's point of view and the unexpected ending was really moving. Keep up the great work Mrs. Lahiri!
Beautifully written Following the enormously successful 'The Interpreter of Maladies' and 'The Namesake', Ms. Lahiri weaves a beautiful set of stories in this evocative collection.
In her inimitable style, we view the world in the persona of the protagonists - taciturn, often Bengali. They do much of the "talking" sans dialogue, expressing their complex and deep emotions about the world around them. It is here that Ms.Lahiri's literary magic really becomes apparent. She paints broad brush strokes of time and emotion yet is remarkably descriptive of the smallest facets, taking us into the mind of her characters. In amazing detail, she outlines the smallest bits of scenery, without ever sounding verbose or dull. While one may not have ventured to all of her locales - Calcutta, Seattle or her favorite Ivy League settings in the northeast or an autumnal Italy, her vivid descriptions enable us to be right there. For the first half of the book, we are taken for 50-60 pages at a time into the lives of Ruma, a daughter who feels a strong sense of duty towards her widowed father who visits her and bonds with his grandson, all while concealing his secret love affair, to the "crush" of a married woman for another man as seen through the eyes of her daughter. The couple Megan and Amit who attend a weekend wedding with their own marriage having a crisis moment to Sudha grappling with her guilt at her brother's alcoholism to the story of Paul who harbors unreciprocated feelings for his housemate Sang and is drawn into her life in a manner he never anticipates. The second half of the book deals with the stories of Hema and Kaushik as their lives intersect as kids, the secret and kinship they share, Kaushik's life and a chance encounter decades later that leaves so much behind and yet doesn't.
One does not have to be Bengali or even Indian to appreciate the universal appeal of the human stories she deftly weaves - infidelity, familial interactions with parents and siblings, love, loss and longing and of course her themes of straddling two cultures. She writes as before, of immigrants who struggle to adjust and who build their own little bubbles. But the feelings are global as is Kaushik the photojournalist who thinks "he had so little to do with India.....and yet.....he was always regarded as an Indian first".
The subset of people who may have roots in both Calcutta and the US is probably limited. A few uniquely Bengali mentions - to wit, a grimy "flat" in Maniktala, chanachur (an Indian snack for "tea" time), Haldiram's (purveyor of the same) and words like dada and boudi (for elder brother and sister-in law often not used in a strict relational sense) merely ignited a sense of kinship with the author. Her richly textured writing made these literary easter eggs all the more savory while I knew that almost everyone was likely to find situations, feelings and characters that they could relate to.
Some of the stories do not really come to "fruition" in a conventional sense. The complexities of what may transpire next are left to our imaginations. The characters and their stories leave a sense of poignancy that lasts long after.
Flawlessly written stories about regret There is nothing flashy about author Jhumpa Lahiri's writing. It's simply true. She writes flawlessly about secrets held close, about heartbreak and regret. At the end of each of these quiet stories, you feel an emotional wallop.
The characters invariably include a person or persons of Indian descent -- usually a Bengali. I was unfamiliar with Indian culture when I began reading Unaccustomed Earth, but it didn't hurt my enjoyment or understanding. The stories are universal. You only need to be human to relate to the characters and their situations.
My heart ached for these people, because I recognized them. The retired widower yearning for a new life. The silent mother hiding a broken heart. The charming brother giving in to weakness, ruining all that is good. These people could easily be my relatives, my closest of friends, or yours. Everyone has a secret to hide. Everyone regrets.
Although the stories are often sad, they always ring true. This book is an empathetic look at what it is to be human.An absorbing collection of stories about the complexities of human relationships Having enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's earlier works, The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, I was looking forward to her new book, and wasn't disappointed. There is something mesmerising about Ms Lahiri's writing style - her use of words, metaphors, and the masterful ability to draw characters that are complex and interesting, whose stories draw you into a world that may seem alien at first, but is altogether familiar - this is her gift, and what makes her stories so compelling.
Reading these stories, one can't help but wonder if they are autobiographical in any way - they seem so true, not merely works of fiction, and even more amazing, I felt that some of these stories reflected some of my own struggles in life - the complex relationship between a daughter and her father in the title story "Unaccustomed Earth" [being Indian, though not Bengali] I completely identified with the awkwardness between father and daughter, having been raised to maintain a respectful distance from my own father, who has never been one to be openly affectionate. It amazes me that Ms Lahiri is able to portray such relationships so convincingly. The character of the father in the story reflects at one point "the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start." This is a thread that flows through the stories in this collection.
In the second story, "Hell-Heaven", a young girl Usha observes the friendship that develops between her parents and a young Bengali man, Pranab, and how this profoundly affects her mother's life, in both positive and negative ways. The title refers to intermarriage between a Bengali and an American,and the story credibly brings out the issues inherent in such pairings whilst on a deeper level, exploring the relationship between a mother and her daughter.
In "A Choice of Accommodations", a jaded couple that has been married for eight years attend a friend's wedding where a reluctant confession brings them together in a harsh yet tender way.
I could go on - but some of the other reviewers have already given the gist of the stories in this collection. In conclusion, Unaccustomed Earth is a wonderful study of the complexities of human relationships, between parent-child, husband-wife, brother-sister, lovers and each story illustrates how these ties come to be taken for granted, ties that may seem to be a given, yet are never easily defined, and continue to evolve with time. Highly recommended for those who appreciate well-drawn characters and stories of human relationships.Accustomed to Success - A Fine Collection of Eight Short Stories 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.
