BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

We rarely, rarely offer fiction, but with the great debate over immigration, we thought that we would offer the new bestselling book by Pulitzer Prize winning Jhumpa Lahiri, an American of Indian descent. The movie "The Namesake" is based on her novel.

It is not that Lahiri is a political novelist. She's a thoroughbred fiction writer who explores the "grey zone" of Bengali immigrant families. In doing so, and with such radiant attention to detail, she reminds us that we are all of immigrant backgrounds.

But be reminded, she is not a political writer, just a luminescent one.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children—and that separates the children from India—remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning. In the title story, Brooklyn-to-Seattle transplant Ruma frets about a presumed obligation to bring her widower father into her home, a stressful decision taken out of her hands by his unexpected independence. The alcoholism of Rahul is described by his elder sister, Sudha; her disappointment and bewilderment pack a particularly powerful punch. And in the loosely linked trio of stories closing the collection, the lives of Hema and Kaushik intersect over the years, first in 1974 when she is six and he is nine; then a few years later when, at 13, she swoons at the now-handsome 16-year-old teen's reappearance; and again in Italy, when she is a 37-year-old academic about to enter an arranged marriage, and he is a 40-year-old photojournalist. An inchoate grief for mothers lost at different stages of life enters many tales and, as the book progresses, takes on enormous resonance. Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals

From Reddiff.com, Indians Abroad:

In her spare and yet lyrical writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling writer Jhumpa Lahiri tells intimate stories of immigrants in America. Critics say her stories of immigrant angst, family bonds, betrayals and redemption require no atlas or detailed narration of the backgrounds of her characters. They engage and stir readers across the globe because they are intriguing and, at the same time, also look at the losses and gains immigrants make when they move from one society to another.

"I thought I wouldn't make it as a writer, and hoped to at least become an art historian," she says. But when she attended a writer's workshop, she discovered she could indeed write -- and write exceedingly well. She has since taught creative writing at Boston University, her alma mater.

"I have inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because
in her words
'My sense is that for many immigrants it's like a death and a rebirth to leave your native country and come to another world -- especially one that's so different...'

Photo: Scott Gries /
Getty Images
it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up," says London-born Lahiri who has spent over three decades in America, winning a Pulitzer in 2000 for her first published work, Interpreter of Maladies.

She also acquired from her parents, "the sense of what many parents had sacrificed moving to America, and yet at the same time, building a life here (like the immigrant couple in her novel The Namesake) and all that entailed."

A very private person, Lahiri quietly encourages new writers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young children. Bengali culture is important to her, her parents say. "When she goes to India and speaks Bengali, hardly anyone can say she was born abroad and has lived here for most of her life," says her mother.

With the popularity of the film, the novel The Namesake is again on many bestseller lists. The film is the best gift director Mira Nair could have given her, says the writer.

Ultimately, what makes Jhumpa Lahiri a writer of such importance is her ability to empathise with the immigrant's song. Having lived it herself, she has a way of taking disparate stories of people torn apart by two cultures, and weaving them into tales that charm, delight, and help make real this complicated, yet life-affirming, experience.

From the Miami Herald Review:

Graceful and devastating, Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of stories revisits much of what readers already associate with her from her two preceding and much celebrated books, Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, yet inspires admiration all over again. Eight spacious tales of families with Bengali roots relocated in North America (often Massachusetts) extend wide and deep, delivered with supple technique, patient sensitivity and the lethal power of a left hook.

Lahiri has an extraordinary ability to take the long view. Her stories can reach easily across decades, as marriages run their courses, students grow up bearing the burdens of their youth and parents reach late understanding with their adult children. Intimacy and life-taught detachment combine in her work like conjoined twins.

Family is her territory, ''typical and terrifying'' she describes it in Only Goodness, a three-generational story of two siblings dealing differently with the heavy expectations of achievement laid on the offspring of the Bengali community. It's a powerful work, containing some moments of heart-quickening suspense when a reformed-alcoholic brother is left in charge of a baby....

Unaccustomed Earth sees its author returning tirelessly to her fertile terrain, reworking its elements, digging deep, exposing what is exceptional in the everyday. In Only Goodness, the heroine visits London's National Gallery and comes across the 15th century Jan van Eyck portrait of The Arnolfini Marriage, a famously glowing study of a Dutch couple. Like the stories, it's a gorgeous, meticulous and inviting work, seemingly accessible despite its origins. But the picture and the stories share more: They encompass much that is not evident at first glance and are the work of an artist wise in enigmas and human mystery.



BUZZFLASH REVIEWS