Shorter ‘Unaccustomed Earth’
Every Jhumpa story ever, until the very last:
in with a from grapples with Bengaliness in a dreary suburban relationship with .
on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008, 5:20 pm in Humor, Jhumpa Lahiri, Literature › 
Email this
› 
Facebook this
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
Hilarious !! Reminds me of random thesis topic generator by UIUC
Kesava, just saw your blog. It’s real funny dude.
Spot on.
Manish,
Great stuff!
I seem to remember a thread on Ultrabrown in which quite a few commenters contributed to create the first few sentences of a standard Indi- exotic novel ( spices/mehendi/arranged marriage/mangoes etc etc) - can’t find it.
My point is: can you generalize this to create the standard Indian novel? :-)
One standard Indian novel, coming right up :)
ha ha ha
thanks ,Manish ! I am gonna book mark that to remind me how never to write :-)
Alas I have read all her books. But isn’t every one of them the same?
Awesome!!!
Manish,
I really like the use of buttons to write this post (very creative).
Ingenious. Loving it.
You are way too clever.
Thanks y’all. Stay tuned for my even shallower critique of Rosa Parks using stick figures and finger paint.
Funny, funny, funny.
And perhaps more original, in one sense, than the longer version?
Last weekend, as I was reading a review of ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ in our local paper, I caught myself thinking, “Haven’t I seen this review somewhere already…about 8 years ago?” I guess that is the unintended consequence of writing only what you know well, however fine and polished that writing is.
But then again, I am the kind who loves the versatility of T.C.Boyle.
Very funny. But rather like beating up on Jane Austen for only writing about gutsy provincial belles, or Henry James for writing about old and new upper class worlds. I’m a bit wary of an approach to literature that makes it about social reference points, whether in terms of identity or class or place, even if setting is important - what Jhumpa is good at is the micro level of individuals and relationships. I wonder if the identity politics of the US makes it more difficult to see these stories as something beyond the Overeducated Immigrant Experience lit. (And personally I find Rushdie’s writing pretty repetitive and annoying myself, but for some reason it’s not acceptable to criticise him because he’s a Pioneering God or something).
It’s unacceptable to criticize Rushdie? Have you read his reviews recently? Here, have a Michiko.
Unacceptable among desi or desiphile hipsters, I should have said. Of course his recent stuff is utter garbage so that makes it easier ;)
With Rushdie it’s almost like being forced to admire a showy lehnga with Lots of Work on It, how could you not marvel at the creativity, the turns of phrase, the wild leaps of imagination, look, look! I personally preferred his more political-allegorical stories.
And I do sense that desi female novelists get beaten up on a lot more than the male ones (I was in India when people actually got around to reading God of Small Things instead of just boasting about Our Arundhati Roy who Won that Prize and the slamming quickly took a misogynistic turn; similarly the description of Jhumpa as Uptight Librarian makes me squirm). I think Naipaul is utter crap myself and yet one has to pay homage to the man’s literary genius even if one disagrees with his politics or whatever.
SP: I think people generally really like Naipaul’s writing. I mean, I think there is an accepted agreement among the powers that be that say, Naipaul’s writing is GOOD. Hence, Nobel. And before he was a right wing baddie, he was Mr. Post-Colonial. How times change. Anyway, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I think that’s perfectly fine. I go back and forth on Lahiri - sometimes I think it’s good writing that is overly praised and sometimes I think, well, there must be a point to it since so many people with good taste like it. Personally, I read it, like it, and think, but wait, isn’t Bharati Mukherjee’s early stuff essentially the same in style, content and quality?
In the end, unless you are involved in this stuff as a critic or English lit type, or such, I don’t think it matters. Like what you like and read what you want to read. I mean, Bronte criticized Austen, you know? Not everyone has to like to like everything, even if it’s accepted as the GOOD.
And Manish? Dude, it’s okay that other people think something is good that you don’t think is good. This post will not convince them otherwise. Most likely, they will just dig in.
I am telling you, a sentence-off is more clear. Pick famous sentences from other greats and put them up against Lahiris famous passages and let people decide for themselves. I think it would make a very interesting experiment.
Oh, SP, my ‘it’s perfectly fine,’ sounded a bit condescending. I just meant, no one has to fall in line behind any writer. In fact, I think readers who really love novels have several authors like that - people who are accepted as greats that they just don’t care for. I think it’s a sign of taste, actually :)
You are an Engineer, Manish!!!
When will you people stop to automate everything that you get your hands on :-))
Taste is euphemism for personal politics. And we all, without a single exception, have our own brand and try to push our own in the market place of ideas. That doesn’t make us less or more noble than the person next in line; just less or more powerful than that person next in line in a given political environment.
I didn’t see myself in any of Lahiri’s characters (one level of my personal politics), yet I read her first two books. First it was because I wanted to experiece this euphoria that every one –even on NPR–was talking about; I didn’t want to be left behind; I wanted to be thought of as well-read, so to speak (so another layer of my personal politics). In the process, I dicovered her style was easy to read; I allowed myself to be moved by some of the stories even though my own stories, if I were ever to write them, would be vastly different from hers; I even actually liked her prose (after skipping some long descriptions). But most importantly I came away with a sense that those who follow her had better learn what makes her special because now she has become enough of a force in North America that future writers (of desi subjects) are inevitably going to be fairly or unfairly compared to her. That thought brought with it some unsettling resentment perhaps because I sensed some loss of power from undefined desi subgroups (yet another layer of my personal politics).
Contrast this with the early works of Rushdie, Naipaul, (and all works of) Seth who gave you a variety of issues, ideas; a smorgasboard of characters. I see myself and others I know within the pages of their books. Ironically, they make their writing harder to access–they demand a commitment and hard work from the reader–they risk losing the very reader that they most likely wrote about in the first place. It is with this thought in mind that I approach their books–so even if it takes me more than a month to reread ‘Midnight’s Children’ I do it slowly savoring the many meanings just one word might hold in the context of his book. If needed, I take a break–by reading a story from Lahiri’s world with which, despite being part of The Diaspora, I have very little in common with.
So glad somebody said this…