Lahiri’s librarian lit
Jhumpa Lahiri read ‘Hell-Heaven‘ at MIT last night from her upcoming short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. The story was originally published in the New Yorker in ‘04.
There were maybe 400 people in the Physics 101-style lecture hall and another 200 in an overflow line which stretched a city block, the full length of the Gehry building. We were stuck outside the auditorium watching her on TV. This was hands down the biggest book reading I’ve ever attended. That’s the difference between a novelist and a screenwriter.
She’s passionless, droning, machined when reading at speed. I enjoy her melancholy writing at my own pace. The Namesake left me nostalgic, like Yaadein. But her readings are interminable. Most authors read two or three short, juicy bits and break for questions. Lahiri picked a single four-year-old story which her hardcore fans have already devoured and read it straight through for 40 minutes. She barely looked up, reading off a script like an inexperienced lecturer or a novice debater with no connection to the audience. She’s an engineer’s writer, daughter of an MIT dad. Her style, like her fashion, is fully buttoned up.
Lahiri’s not a textual stylist. She shows-not-tells by the steady accumulation of mundanities. She’s like a first-year litigator who lays out exhibits A through Z but refuses to deliver a closing argument. I remember brilliant little turns of phrase from Rushdies of years past, but from Lahiri only diffuse themes.
Her topics are ancient. She writes about her parents, and the conflicts are topics from the ’80s. Her idea of transgression is smoking a joint and shtupping an Anglo. Daring! Her moral universe is almost as limited as Rishi Reddi’s; both even have heroines who become librarians. I read to expand my mind. This is keyhole lit, like Maps for Lost Lovers and Brick Lane.
Lahiri picked the story because it’s about MIT, and noted at the end, ‘I’m writing about the same world, largely about Bengali immigrants and their children… If anyone’s read my previous books, this book won’t be startlingly new in this regard.’ That’s probably an understatement.
She egregiously mispronounced ‘Dev Anand,’ ‘Calcutta’ and ‘achha,’ which is odd given that this is her entire schtick.
A lot of the questions were about how racist conservative desis are in rejecting cross-cultural marriage. I wondered how many students at the reading were in these relationships, facing these issues in real life. But they are also very elemental issues, resolved by most people by the time they leave college.
Lahiri came alive just once, at the end of the Q&A when she said she thinks a lot about marriage: ‘Arranged marriage is just marriage. The wedding is just the beginning. The hard work is in maintaining the relationship.’ She said she found it difficult to pick her kids’ names, and thinks ‘all American families are immigrants, it just depends how far removed you are from the plane or boat.’ It was the only time she let emotion leak through her radiation shield.
Tony D’Souza hits the same themes far more successfully, even though he’s only written one desi novel (The Konkans) and does not confine himself to the genre. His writing is looser, more shambolic, but also more fresh. He too wrote about the first gen, romance between a woman and her brother-in-law and resistance to interracial marriage. But his mindset is international and postracial, his writing style playful, while Lahiri’s is far more cautious.
I’m of two minds about her. The Namesake gave her an enormous audience, yet she who is the de facto face of 2nd gen desi American lit is so uninspiring. She’s competent but not fresh, the inverse of Sanjaya. But at least she’s not some clown Apu’ing her way through America.
Fleeing the reading, Improper Bostonian and I had a swaggering, mustard-infused potato entrée at Royal Bengal. It looked bland as egg salad but punched like wasabi. Yum.
A clip from the reading:
on Thursday, March 6th, 2008, 1:29 am in Events, Food, Jhumpa Lahiri, Literature, Photographs, Video clips › 
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I’ve heard she’s rather shy and wooden at readings, but I think you might just not care for her style overall. I quite like it, even if she does repeat themes all the time. I find her spare, laying-it-out no-judgement storytelling style rather like (don’t laugh) Chekhov’s. Am not a fan of Rushdie, who I find too ornate - trying to be so clever that he forces you to look, see! see what I did there!
Nothing about Jhumpa, but ‘yaadein’ probably is one of the worst movies i have seen :)
You’re at your finest when you’re critical! :) I guess I’m not surprised that she’s cold when she reads. She comes across that way in her writing, too… I once told someone she writes like she doesn’t have a uterus, which I guess is a bitchy thing to say! I think I only enjoyed The Namesake because I had seen the movie first, so the one corresponding in my head as I read the book was richly filled out by the actors.
I had heard the NPR interview earlier regarding Namesake (it reflects the same opinion as above) - Listen Here
I agree with you: I’ve heard Jhumpa speak in the past and she can definitely come across as aloof, and monotonous … but somehow that doesn’t stop people from going to hear her read. I don’t think there’s a rule which states that all literary figures have to come with stage presence and oratory skills. To me there is a connection between her reading voice and her writing voice. Her narratives , as you so nicely put it, offer details from A-Z but we always have a feeling of being far away, of observing… maybe that’s why I love her work so much. It’s not easy to write in the third person and she does it with such flair and such wisdom that it makes me understand the characters as human beings, not as Bengalis or desis or 1st or second generation south asians. In Unaccustomed Earth, she actually has a few stories with first person narrators — and a couple that are different than your typical Cambridge 70s -80s narratives. I found this refreshing. Am going to write a review of the book next week, but in the meanwhile just wanted to jump in on the conversation….
Manish, what’s with you and Bengali-American novelists! :) First Bharati and now Jhumpa, and maybe Chitra in between.
I tend to agree, though, with the comment on her rather dry reading style, which I also noticed in the NPR interview linked in above. I read through Interpreter of Maladies during an hour’s train ride - with time to spare - didn’t make much of an impression on me - while each of Mukherjee’s books and short story collections have left an impression. I don’t think it’s the generational thing entirely, since you seem to agree also. I haven’t read Namesake, though.
BTW, when I saw the linked in clip, I had to wonder if this was the same Jhumpa, though! Because this one inspires fan blog posts in Spanish!
40 mins of monotone sounds brutal… also, how’d you get the guy in the 1st picture to pose for you like that? he looks so comfortable
I think her monotone drone goes perfectly with her antiseptic descriptions of the crushingly mundane lives she catalogs.
That actually quite irritated me.
Culcaata? That’s like Bush saying eye-rack. If your entire career is based around one geography, the least you can do is figure out how it’s said.
Oosha instead of Ushaa? And Dev Anaand instead of “Dave Aanand”? At least, put in the effort to figure out the right pronunciation of the few Indian names in your book, for Kali Ma’s sake!
I wasn’t there for the Lahiri reading, but I wouldn’t be so hard on her for that. It’s written ‘Kolkata’ now, but many Bengalis I grew up with in the 1980s used to shorten it to ‘Cal’ when it used be ‘Calcutta’, pronouncing it exactly like Cal Berkeley. Like in ‘I’m going to Cal for the Pooja holidays’. Almost everyone else I knew, as well as the official media, pronounced the ‘Cal’ in Calcutta the same way.
Or to put it more grandly, the locus of authenticity changes over time. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe that is one of the messages in Lahiri’s work, taken in the large.
BTW, Usha is pronounced Oosha!
‘
She didn’t say Cal-cutta, she pronounced it the way Americans do, contracting the first syllable and elongating the second.
Isn’t it written in Sanskrit or Hindi with the short oo, not the long one? At least, that’s what I always thought, but maybe I am mistaken.
It is indeed written with the short uu. Another place to look is here (enter uSas).
OK, you’re right IB, Usha really is Ushaa. Sorry about that. Shabdkosh.com and Google Transliteration tool both bear you out.
But all the Usha’s I’ve ever known in real life I’ve called ‘Oosha’, and so have their family and our other friends! We’ve all been wrong. Then again, the locus of authenticity has clearly changed. What was good enough back when is no longer so :)
Yes, but how was it pronounced in proto-Aramaic?
Come on Manish, you know that articulation conventions in the Semitic and Indo-European language branches are not homomorphic.
But I now think I understand why the reading might have gone on for 40 minutes. It was a Cambridge, MA crowd!
And btw, the way IB says JL pronounced ‘Calcutta’ - it seems closer to that intended by the re-spelling ‘Kolkata’, no?
I’d have been able to figure that out but it’s not on Google Transliterate’s list! Bloody anti-Semites!
No, that would have been sort-of coalcoatha, it was very clearly the American accented pronunciation.
You could hardly hear a peep from the audience during the reading. They were bludgeoned into silence by her toneless hum. Her reading is matched only by her writing and her plotting.
That Gehry building is as cold as concrete, or at least, that’s what some of those floors look like to me. Chilly-chilly.
I’ve never warmed to Lahiri, either, but that’s because I read Bharati Mukherjee first, in the early nineties, and thought to myself reading Interpeter of Maladies, “I’ve read this before, haven’t I?” But, I’m in the minority and fully accept that. Kudos to Lahiri.
*As for ‘keyhole’ lit, I don’t have a problem with it - it’s her art world and her art vision. Narrow worlds didn’t stop Jane Austen, etc.
Oh, and to Improper Bostonian above, you can do crushingly mundane in a very interesting way. Look up Misadventures by Sylvia Smith. It’s not for everyone, but it was for me. Mundane can be sort of ‘out there’ if done, well, in a different way.
Thanks for the suggestion, I will look it up. But, it is not the mundaneness of the plot that bothers me, you can still tell interesting stories about ordinary lives, Lahiri doesn’t though, for the most part. The only story in Interpreter that I liked was ‘Sexy’, and while the nostalgia aspect of Namesake grabbed me, it was in spite of the writing, not because of it.
The following are acceptable pronounciations for a Bengali:
Cal (still used chachaji)
Cal-c’ta (hard Cal like California and shortened second syllable)
Kol-kata (evenly paced short syllables)
Some say Kulkata (cf ‘cull’) but tend to be non-Bengalis, however it is not frowned upon. The cardinal sin would be to elongate any of the vowels. I still have very little idea what Jhumpa Lahiri looks like, as all her pictures are so wildly different. I’m quite similar to Manish in my views of her, it seems. No major interest, bar being the only author I know to have written a story about a character with my name.
Sincerely, a Bengali.
It is, I suspect, a ‘yah-huh’ vs. ‘yay’ thing (think of how you say ‘this’ in Hindi). Virtually everyone knows it should be pronounced as it is written (’yah-huh’), but in everyday speech it becomes corrupted to ‘yay.’ Same with the word ‘Usha’ - spelled with a chotta u, but pronounced ooo-sha. Pronunciation evolves over time, and I’m pretty sure (at least in North India), everybody enunciates it like ooo-sha.
Remember the ubiquitous Usha sewing machines?
IB - stop with the Boston brahmin snobbery. I denounce it and furthermore, I reject it.
I never found Jhumpa that impressive a writer..Kiran Desai is so much better and so creative..Jhumpa’s writing doesnot come from her creative imagination, they are all just narrations of her parents or grandparents tales or her experiences as an indian american..I dont like her writing style too..I liked her interpreter of maladies because it was unique short story collection..name sake was boring for me..I dont know Jhumpa , chitra divakaruni stopped exciting me..kiran desai still keeps me excited enough for her new release..though Kirans first novel hallabo…at guava orchid was somewhat like RKNarayans Guide but her second novel Inheritance of loss was very good…
I am more excited about indian american /NRI men writers..be it Rushdie,seth,naipaul,kunzru,rana dasgupta..they all are so much better than women writers and are more creative with unique writing style…they are at a different level in terms of their literary achievements and diverse topics they write on compared to women writers..
The best was when she and Mira Nair were at the NYPL discussing The Namesake. Nair is like a firecracker; the first thing she did was correct that annoying NYPL guy who pronounced her name like the hair removal product. Lahiri looked like a totem pole next to Nair.
For other people like me who weren’t there, here’s a link to the NYPL Discussion that Tamasha mentioned: 1 hr 35 min audio file, the audio from the movie clips played for the live audience is also in it.
Here’s the transcript, and I also found a 3 min video clip from the NYPL discussion.
I found the whole discussion quite interesting, and worthwhile - both the Lahiri-Nair interaction, and the audience input. In fact, Kal Penn also makes a surprize appearance. One of the things they dwell on at some length is the extent to which the movie is faithful to the novel, and Jhumpa feels overall that the movie is an alternate take, a different version of the story. Mira Nair said that she had dovetailed some of her own sense of alienation in the West, as well as aspects of her own marriage, into the picturization of the novel. I don’t know what Tamasha meant precisely by ‘totem pole’, but Nair does most of the talking in the discussion, and is, of course, the senior person on the panel.
BTW, the NYPL discussion was exactly a year ago today (Saturday 3/10/07), and, as I write this, almost to the hour. (two days off because of the leap year) How quickly time passes!
Tamasha, the NYPL guy is Austrian-born, from Salzburg. He might have been sending ‘Nair’ though the Germanic phonetic filter, he pronounced it like ‘near’. :)
(The first ten seconds or so of the audio clip is some random music. Wait for the German-accented guy to begin the proceedings.)
Nair can be a fabulously charismatic speaker. Her acceptance speech for the Harvard award was funny, warm, earnest, erudite– she was like an earnest Salman Rushdie.
Ha. Wow, ya think? Though, one could say the same about Rushdie and not be bitchy. And all male writers.
Inspired by all this dialogue I decided to watch Namesake movie for the first time..
I read namesake when it came long time back may be 6-7yrs ago or longer and was bored..
namesake movie made me cry yesterday..there were so many places I could relate a lil bit to Tabu, a lil bit to kal penn, a lil bit to Irfan khan…the same struggle people like me who lived here for more than 10yrs in US go through caught between two countries missing so much about home and yet cannot fit in there also totally in India..I can relate to that loneliness parents feel though Iam not a parent as my parents as they got old feel the same..that scene of Tabu all alone loosing her hubby walking out of her home was gut wrenching painful..I think now I understand first and second generations indians better specially goguls character..
Tabu was good, Irfan khan was better, even kal penn was good..Meera Nair made a very good movie though reading novel I thought it would make a bad movie..
Now I feel like rereading Jhumpa..having aged a lil bit having lost a parent and having lived in US longer may be I will look Namesake novel differently novel..
I cannot stand that NYPL guy. He likes the sound of his own voice a little too much.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore Jhumpa. But I want to be Mira’s friend.
So, growing up with a name like Gogol, was it really that big a deal as she seems to make? Please be honest.