Jhumpa branches out
Attention all readers, attention all readers. You’ll want to sit down for this one, it’s a bit of a shock.
Celebrated author Jhumpa Lahiri has just stunned the literary world by penning a New Yorker story about cultural confusion among 2nd gen Bengalis in Boston. It’s a theme she’s never written about before. Not even in her last New Yorker story. Or her novel. Or her film. Or her short story collection.
Jhumpa, you sly dog.
Next April Fools, she will release an unprecedented collection of Boston Bengali stories called Unaccustomed Earth:
In the… 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. [Link]
Please act surprised. That is all.
on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007, 11:13 pm in Literature › 
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LOLLL!!
I thought this was going to be a post about Jhumpa writing a Padma-like cookbook or launching her own perfume. I’m so disappointed.
dying laughing…
I enjoyed her early stuff, but now she risks becoming the Jay McInerny of Bengalis.
BOOO-RING
I am waiting for the Pakistani-American who will begin writing self-indulgent stories about 2nd gen-ers in Queens.
he he
To us it’s a recycled subject, but to hundreds of millions Americans + English speakers all over the world it is still a novel concept.
Don’t all the pot-boiler authors recycle the essentially the same story: Crichton, Steele, Clancy, Owens, Irving, etc.?
They make a good living doing it.
Yes, but it’s Boston Bengalis every time, with more of the focus on the 1st gen than the 2nd.
I never understood how she got the reputation she did. Her story-writing technique is so obvious, and her characters so whiny.
“Yes, but it’s Boston Bengalis every time, with more of the focus on the 1st gen than the 2nd.”
Hmm, may be she should write about Boston Punjabis ;)
And what is the problem with focus on 1st gen folks :-D
… but she is still so beautiful!
on a literary note, interpreter of maladies was uneven but there were a few strong short stories in there, to her credit.
Incidentally, i saw the faux video interview kalpen did and posted on his weblog for the namesake movie where the reporter kept saying “na-ME-sake (like the rice wine)” in order to show how non-desi people are certain to want to make the movie seem exotic since it has brown faces in it.
anyway, i rented it to watch it with my boyfriend (who only recently moved to the US from Japan), who’s first comment was “oh, we are going to watch “na-ME-sake.”
ha ha ha….
oops! pardon my typo - should be “whose” not “who’s”
im sorry but i am extremely excited! did henry james not write tons of books about wealthy white people at the turn of the century? f scott fitzgerald of the urbane in the northeast? cmon. let her write about what she knows and stop acting like that’s not enough. her talent is enough for me.
Continuing the examples given above… Saul Bellow and Jews in Chicago, Proust and French upper-class, etc. Even though she has been criticized (by James Woods, I think) for hewing too closely to a writing style seemingly manufactured in creative writing courses, in American universities - she still remains in my humble opinion one of the more interesting authors among the IWE set - which may not be saying much but that’s all we have.
I think it boils down to whether you read all her output or are more a casual reader. For the fanbois/fangrrls, it stales quickly as you’re not getting very diverse mental stim.
My issue with Lahiri is not that the subjects of her stories don’t change [i.e. the characters from an Indian/Bengali background assimilating to the Western world as professionals with mixed or forced relationships], but more importantly the themes and statements she makes in her stories and novels above are the same — and are told to us in the same manner — as they were in the terrific Interpreter of Maladies. People above cited many great authors of Western literature, claiming they wrote about one social group in a single region, but their novels [Fitzgerald, Henry James] were rich and versatile both thematically and symbolically in ways Lahiri could only dream of.
Lahiri is still a terrific writer, and right now she is honing her craft writing about subjects that she knows intimately. This is only her third publication, and she has written only ONE novel. I love her style of writing and the way she structures each story, and I’m sure that as Lahiri grows as an author her range will expand beyond the familiar Indian immigrant story.