Each author has a favored setting. Sometimes it is just an imaginery world whether at Malgudi or the Middle Earth. That is where the characters come alive. There is also a favored time period in which most authors tend to operate in. Films are also like that. Each director tends to create a pattern of work. Jhumpa Lahiri is specializing in documenting nuances of the Bengali immigrants. With the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, a book of short stories she found her personalized parking spot among contemporary writers. Then came her novel The Namesake in 2003 which became a phenomenal success even as a film directed by Meera Nair. If I had to compare her first two books, I would vote in favor of The Namesake as representative of her skill as a writer. Except for the title story in The Interpretor of Maladies, which I loved, I did not find the others very engaging. That explains why i am not on the Pulitzer Prize panel of judges !Jhumpa Lahiri is herself a product of the immigration experience. So it is natural that she speaks about the inner world of the Bengali immigrant. The stretches and demands that happen when people leave their land of birth and lead a life that they are unaccustomed to. This time it is about children of immigrants and their awkwardness in straddling the world that their parents never seem to give up and the world around them in a country outside of India that they inhabit. The Slate puts it aptly
It is about not fitting in or settling down, not starting over from scratch and freely forging a new identity or destiny. Her characters balance precariously between two worlds—not just Asian and Western, but inner and outer, traditionally circumscribed and daringly improvised, unwilled and willed—and they do so not just transitionally, but permanently.
When you have eight short stories to read in a book, chances are that there are those I liked more than others. Like in her first novel, I liked the title story the best. It is about the daughter coping with the death of her mother as she stumbles upon evidence of her father’s romantic interest in another lady. The beauty of the prose lies in being able to capture how the two different world views lead to an awkwardness in the relationship. Another story I loved in this collection was the one called Heaven and Hell. That is the story of a Bengali wife’s attraction to another immigrant Bengali man only to fall out of favor for marrying a white American lady. A story that will remind you of Satyajit Ray’s film Charulata which remains one of my all time favorites in cinema.The stories are all about upper middle class Bengali couples and their children who have grown up in the adopted land. The subtle insights into that world are charming. For instance the struggle of parents whose son drops out of an Ivy League college and becomes an alcoholic reflects the Bengali immigrants’ view that education helps a person to climb social rungs in the adopted home.Her natural style seems to be the longish short story. Or shortish novel (is that a novella?) if you will. I find that format tougher and more stringent in its demands of form and characterization. Yet Jhumpa Lahiri does it well… at least in majority of the short stories in Unaccustomed Earth.
