What you will not find in Jhumpa
Chachaji points us to this Time story on Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book which states the obvious:
Among the things you will not find in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction are: humor, suspense, cleverness, profound observations about life, vocabulary above the 10th-grade level, footnotes and typographical experiments. It is debatable whether her keyboard even has an exclamation point on it… In person, Lahiri is almost as reserved as she is on the page… [Link]
Her latest collection’s very accessibility, its refusal to soar on the texture of language rather than an emo kidney punch at the end of a story, is no doubt partly why it sells so well:
Unaccustomed Earth… debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, an astounding feat for a book of quiet, formal short stories about the lives of Bengali immigrants and their children. [Link]
The collection is solid, enjoyable but not memorable. The themes repeat themselves over her prior work and, save for the story set in Rome, are mired in the kind of quiet suburban lives which few other authors believe bear documenting. Unlike Gary Shteyngart, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, her prose doesn’t dazzle. Her mood is an uneasy sorrow which reminds me of the Puritans and the hard earth of Emily Dickinson’s elegies:
Lahiri’s rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren’t born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic)…
Lahiri’s stories are grave and quiet and slow, in the 19th century manner. They don’t bribe you with humor or plot twists or flashy language; they extract a steep up-front investment of time from the reader before they return their hard, dense nuggets of truth. It’s difficult to quote from her stories: they refuse to sum themselves up with a neat final epiphany, and Lahiri doesn’t write one-liners. [Link]
I disagree with the highlighted bit above. The stories do tend to follow a template: a particular ethnicity set in a particular metro area with a particular structure and a reveal at the end. It’s almost as formulaic as M. Night’s œuvre.
on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008, 4:57 am in Jhumpa Lahiri, Literature › 
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hmm… I have not read Unaccustomed Earth, but this makes me want to go out and read it more so than the gushing reviews I have read so far.
A good story is a good story, it’s not about documenting what “a few authors” (or all of mankind for that matter) believe are important to document. It’s about what the author believes is important to document.
And subtlety and things like “uneasy sorrow” are far more difficult to write than one that punches a hole through your literary retinas with its fireworks of adjectives/metaphors.
Not nessecarily. But I think I know what you mean.
I like Jhumpa’s writing and this article actually describes very well where the latent power and originality is in her work.
Lahiri’s stories are static, but what looks like stasis is really the stillness of enormous forces pushing in opposite directions, barely keeping one another in check.
Probably realted….Titlepage.tv episode 5, the most engaging one so far, had Aleksandar Hemon and others. He had a lot to say about immigrant writing.
Yeah, I agree. Not necessarily. But if a short story is able to convey something as complex as “uneasy sorrow”, then I am taking this reviewer’s opinion with a huge grain of salt.
Give me Vikram Seth anyday for tackling “uneasy sorrow” (especially, Two Lives and An Equal Music). His sensitivity always, always makes me cry, yet I have never felt claustrophobic in the company of his fictional or non-fictional characters.
The book is beautifully written although the Ivy League emphasis is a bit jarring.
Ignore all the negativity on the Desi blogs - it’s typical Indian misogyny. Engineer guy smarter than story-writer girl.
And yes I am female but I turned down my IIT admission to do something else.
Really? Where?
I see that you are now recommending D’Souza’s crappy novel the Konkans. But guys must stick together - and ridicule the women.
I am a Konkan and he does not even know that it is not D’Sai (his protagonist) that is a Catholic Konkan name but D’Sa. The ignoramus busy exoticisng his father’s community is mixed dup - and thinking probably of the Inidan name of Desai.
He calls Konkani ‘pdgin’. In reality it is one of the oldest of the Indian languages, closest to Sanskrit, along with Bengali, Assamese etc all considered belonging to the Prakrit linguistic branch.
These are only two of many, many errors and fabrications in his novel. If he wrote such crap about your particular community you wouldn’t be highlighting his books on this blog.
Lahiri writes phenomenally well (the customers who made it Amazon/NYT #1 are not all idiots) - but still sucks up to her Western readership with all the Ivy name-dropping. D’Souza does not even write well but sucks up with a load of exoticising BS about my community.
Manish, if you hate anything done by a woman, it must be because she is a woman. Ergo, misogyny. QED. So simple, and you still don’t get it?
(Of course, if you like it, it must be because she is talented, not because she is a woman.)
Why so heteronormative?
What qualifies as that? Liking women writers? Well, sorry, I think Jhumpa is a drab writer whose books have the momentum of a mollusc, and the emotional depth of a puddle. Her writing focuses on detailed descriptions of objects and emotions, to avoid the difficult task of actually letting the reader infer feelings. I guess that makes me misogynist too. Or dumb. Or both. Oh well. I need to go grieve now.
And, for what it is worth, rage rarely wins arguments, least in matters of taste. And certainly not unsubstantiated rage.
@Akira
I was not asking *you* to exit . I was saying that I would exit.
Racism makes me rageful too - and I am not required to substantiate it to the racists.
Your opinion of Lahiris’s book is a personal one - it is wrong for a blog author claiming to represent the desi community to ridicule or disparage a renowned desi author - and this is not the only desi blog where this happens. Indians need to learn to stand by their own, be proud of their accomplishments and not be jealous.
Hi Kali,
I’d agree that D’ouza’s book is full of factual errors, and i’ve no way of knowing if that is sloppiness or just that he wasn’t particularly trying to be accurate. But how does that detract from the rest of the book? It’s not a guide book, or academic text !!
I found myself recognizing several of the portrayals and attitudes and wondering that a semi-outsider could see them so clearly.
Maybe its not an indictment of the entire community, maybe some of the people he knew were less than perfect human-beings ?.Your experience is probably different, so write your book and if it feels as real, that may make your point far more effectively.
Why can’t we all be friends ? ;-)
No, and no.
Tokerji, consider what manner of net.critter you’re feeding here. Re: the errors, I’m curious– care to enumerate?
I don’t have the book with me anymore - and i probably wouldn’t be able to enumerate anyway, given the work pressure i am under ;-) - , but a typical example would be how his mangalorean family heads-off to goa for the wedding. not in a vegas wedding kind of way, but i got the impression from the narrative that it is typical or traditional for the community.
i’ve never heard of this happening ever, which doesn’t make it untrue, but probably means that it isn’t typical. There is a history that says that the Mangalorean konkanis are an break-away/off shoot/splinter of the goan ones, so i could easily imagine the author extrapolating a little. The way i understand it, any such connection is a few hundred years old (dating back to the portugese conquest) and has been long lost.
I’ll concede that my use of ‘full of’ is sloppy as well and a product of several such impression rather than careful analysis. Maybe a more diligent fact-checker would write “I’d agree that D’souza’s book contains more than one factual error”.
Where it’s most important - to me at any rate -, in a work of fiction, the author more than made up for any liberties he may have taken with other stuff.
Manish, asking this question is a losing battle - it’s a work of fiction!
But it is clearly and completely rooted in actual historical and sociological experience. What’s different about the book is that its autobiographical elements are far more recognizable than in most novels, and that it furthermore adopts a first-person narrative style which leads you even more to think it’s a memoir. But it isn’t, it’s a work of fiction.
BTW, I’ve substantially added to my blogpost on The Konkans, including clips which I think more authentically represent Goan life, especially during the Portuguese era.
I wasn’t *offering* to exit. I was talking about your insistence on a male/female dichotomy, insulting to a non heteronormative free lover like me.
Even Sanjaya?
Now I’m hurt. I had always maintained that the winning way to end an argument was to invoke anti-semitism. A scant 60 years, and already we forget? Shoah and tell, dear.
I didnot read konkans..
but I agree with what Manish wrote in this post about Jhumpa..
she is the best selling indian writer but doesnot mean she is the best writer.
Manish is right, I listened to the audio tape of her new collection “unaccustomed earth” and I have to agree the stories are repetitive, language is plain, there was nothing new about her story telling except for lot of emotions and melancholy and nostalgia associated with first generation and second generations indians missing home or having cultural confusion or trying to connect to roots.
Jhumpa is lucky, she carved a unique niche for herself telling immigrant stories and had successfully sold novels but doesnot mean she is a good or great writer.
And being a woman I would not support Jhumpa or Hillary just because they are women..supporting them all the way would be just supporting feminism without literary merit or political merit.Literary criticism has to be impartial of gender bias and I feel that Manish’s critique here is impartial.