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Summary
Summary
In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself. In "A Choice of Accommodations," a husband's attempt to turn an old friend's wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In "Only Goodness," a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in "Hema and Kaushik," a trio of linked stories - a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate - we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.
Author Notes
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, England on July 11, 1967. She received a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989, and a M.A. in English, a M.A. in Creative Writing, a M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Boston University.
Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut work, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. She has also won the PEN/Hemmingway Award, an O. Henry Award, The New Yorker's best debut of the year award, and an Addison Metcalf award. Her other works include The Namesake, which was made into a movie in 2007, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which won 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly 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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Following her thoughtful first novel, The Namesake (2003), which has been made into a meditative film, Lahiri returns to the short story, the form that earned her the Pulitzer Prize for her debut, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The tight arc of a story is perfect for Lahiri's keen sense of life's abrupt and painful changes, and her avid eye for telling details. This collection's five powerful stories and haunting triptych of tales about the fates of two Bengali families in America map the perplexing hidden forces that pull families asunder and undermine marriages. Unaccustomed Earth, the title story, dramatizes the divide between immigrant parents and their American-raised children, and is the first of several scathing inquiries into the lack of deep-down understanding and trust in a marriage between a Bengali and non-Bengali. An inspired miniaturist, Lahiri creates a lexicon of loaded images. A hole burned in a dressy skirt suggests vulnerability and the need to accept imperfection. Van Eyck's famous painting, The Arnolfini Marriage, is a template for a tale contrasting marital expectations with the reality of familial relationships. A collapsed balloon is emblematic of failure. A lost bangle is shorthand for disaster. Lahiri's emotionally and culturally astute short stories (ideal for people with limited time for pleasure reading and a hunger for serious literature) are surprising, aesthetically marvelous, and shaped by a sure and provocative sense of inevitability.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Quaint and antique, the cry for love of country that Sir Walter Scott made in his poem "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" is something schoolchildren quit memorizing a century ago. Its stirring theme rouses a patriot's yearning: "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,/Who never to himself hath said,/This is my own, my native land!" It's easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself - accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs - is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri's sensitive new collection of stories, "Unaccustomed Earth." Here, as in her first collection, "Interpreter of Maladies," and her novel, "The Namesake," Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn't necessarily the country you're tied to by blood or birth: it's the place that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any map. The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiri's epigraph, a metaphysical passage from "The Custom-House," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women "strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." It's an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America - the newcomers and their hyphenated children - struggle to build normal, secure lives. But Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne's notion as test it. Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes? As her characters mature in their new environments, they carry with them the potential for upheaval. Geography is no guarantee of security. Lahiri shows that people may be felled at any time by swift jabs of chance, wherever they happen to live. Uncontrollable events may assail them - accidents of fate, health or weather. More often, they suffer less dramatic reversals: failed love affairs, alcoholism, even simple passivity - the sort of troubles that seem avoidable to everyone except the person who succumbs to them. Like Laura, the well-meaning narrator of "Brief Encounter," the men and women of Lahiri's stories often find themselves overwhelmed by unexpected passions. They share her refrain: "I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people." Again and again, the reader is caught off-guard by the accesses of emotion and experience that waylay Lahiri's characters, despite their peregrinations, their precautions, their concealments. Each of the five stories in the book's first section is self-contained. In "Hell-Heaven," the assimilated Bengali-American narrator considers how little thought she once gave to her mother's sacrifices as she reconstructs the tormenting, unrequited passion her young mother had for a graduate student during the narrator's childhood. In "Only Goodness," an older sister learns a sharp lesson about the limits of her responsibility to a self-destructive younger brother. "A Choice of Accommodations" shows a shift in power dynamics between a Bengali-American husband and his workaholic Anglo wife during a weekend away from their kids - at the wedding of the husband's prep-school crush. And the American graduate student at the center of "Nobody's Business" pines for his Bengali-American roommate, a graduate-school dropout who entertains no romantic feelings for him, spurns the polite advances of "prospective grooms" from the global Bengali singles circuit and considers herself engaged to a selfish, foul-tempered Egyptian historian. In the title story, Ruma, a Bengali-American lawyer, repeats her mother's life pattern when she gives up her job and follows her husband to a distant city as they await the birth of their second child. "Growing up, her mother's example - moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household - had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma's life now." The nurturing force field of pregnancy shields Ruma from the sting this reflection might be expected to provoke, but it doesn't protect her widowed father. When he visits her in Seattle from his condo in Pennsylvania, he asks her a very American question: "Will this make you happy?" Urging Ruma not to isolate herself, to look for work, he reminds her that "self-reliance is important." Thinking back on his wife's unhappiness in the early years of their marriage, he realizes that "he had always assumed Ruma's life would be different." But if his daughter chooses a life in Seattle that she could have led in Calcutta, who's to say this isn't evidence of another kind of freedom? Ruma is struck by how much her father "resembled an American in his old age. With his gray hair and fair skin he could have been practically from anywhere." Seeing his daughter, Ruma's father has the opposite reaction: "She now resembled his wife so strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly." Ruma's identity, Lahiri suggests, is affected less by her coordinates on the globe than by the internal indices of her will. She is a creature of the American soil, but she carries her own emotional bearings within her. What are the real possibilities for change attached to a move? Lahiri seems to ask. What are the limits? While tending Ruma's neglected garden, her father shows his grandson how to sow seeds. The boy digs holes, but plants Legos in them, along with a plastic dinosaur and a wooden block with a star. Emblems of the international, the prehistoric and the celestial, they are buried in one garden plot, auguries of an ideal future, a utopia that could be anywhere or nowhere. How can it grow? Lahiri's final three stories, grouped together as "Hema and Kaushik," explore the overlapping histories of the title characters, a girl and boy from two Bengali immigrant families, set during significant moments of their lives. "Once in a Lifetime" begins in 1974, the year Kaushik Choudhuri and his parents leave Cambridge and return to India. Seven years later, when the Choudhuris return to Massachusetts, Hema's parents are perplexed to find that "Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had." The next story, "Year's End," visits Kaushik during his senior year at Swarthmore as he wrestles with the news of his father's remarriage and meets his father's new wife and stepdaughters. The final story, "Going Ashore," begins with Hema, now a Latin professor at Wellesley, spending a few months in Rome before entering into an arranged marriage with a parent-approved Hindu Punjabi man named Navin. Hema likes Navin's traditionalism and respect: "It touched her to be treated, at 37, like a teenaged girl." The couple plan to settle in Massachusetts. But in Rome, Hema runs across Kaushik, now a world-roving war photographer. "As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant," Kaushik thinks. But how irrelevant are Kaushik's origins - to Hema and to himself? And which suitor will Hema choose? The romantic who has no home outside of memory? Or the realist who wants to make a home where his wife chooses to live? Except for their names, "Hema and Kaushik" could evoke any American's '70s childhood, any American's bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the waves of admiration, competition and criticism that flow between the two families could occur between Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight for connection and control between Hema and Kaushik - as children and as adults - replays the tussle that has gone on ever since men and women lived in caves. Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth. The place to which you feel the strongest attachment may not be the country you're tied to by blood or birth. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
Devastated by his mother's death and his father's acquisition of a replacement bride, Kaushik, a protagonist in Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection of short stories, storms out of the wealthy suburbs of Massachusetts. He drives northward, aimlessly, towards the desolate, craggy country near the Canadian border. After journeying through pine forests and contemplating ocean that "was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times", he's able to sense an elusive power, a power he believes his deceased mother now possesses. For Kaushik, the great American wilderness is a kind of temple. It awes him, just as it did New England's transcendentalist writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. This parallel isn't surprising. Lahiri, a Bengali-American who's been lauded as a teller of immigrant tales, is at core an old-guard New England writer. Her new book begins with a quote from Hawthorne, and this stirringly existential anthology recalls the New Englander JD Salinger's pessimistic vision of human relationships. It's not that she ignores India or immigration. Her previous books, both groundbreaking in their own way, chronicle the pain and loneliness experienced by Bengali immigrants in the northeastern US, and this latest collection treads similar ground. In the story "Hell-Heaven", Usha, looking back on her Boston childhood, conjures up the sociocultural alienation that burdened her mother, a woman who wears "the red and white bangles unique to Bengali married women". Things lighten up for Usha's mother when she falls in love with Pranab, a bachelor Bengali immigrant who's studying at MIT. "He brought to my mother the first and, I suspect, the only pure happiness she ever felt." Usha's mother is left heartbroken when Pranab decides to marry a white woman. At Pranab's wedding, Lahiri depicts various cultural clashes between Bengali and American cultures, a simplistic leftover from her previous work that enables her to spoon-feed western readers information about race and migration. Usha's father, she explains, works "through his meal, his fork and knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china, because he was accustomed to eating with his hands". His wife, on the other hand, behaves childishly, "speaking in Bengali, complaining about the formality of the proceedings". She is an archetypal female immigrant in Lahiri's world, anachronistic and disempowered. This disempowerment trickles into the lives of her second-generation immigrant characters as well, as in the title story, "Unaccustomed Earth". Ruma, whose mother died after a reaction to anaesthesia, has recently moved to the lonely suburbs of Seattle with her workaholic white husband and bi-racial son Akash. "Growing up, her mother's example - moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household - had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma's life now." Her single father is about to visit their home for the first time, and Ruma is distressed by the possibility that he might decide to live with them permanently. But her father, who, like most of the book's male characters, is strikingly multidimensional, has his own worries. He's started dating a Bengali woman, and he painstakingly ponders divulging the details of this relationship to his daughter. As father and daughter enjoy an unexpectedly blissful week, Lahiri creates a gripping tale, which, like most of her stories, is driven by a simple question: can her characters escape loneliness and be happy? The answer, more often than not, is no. Death, disease and migration, among other things, keep people isolated. Despite this unending bleakness - or perhaps because of it - Lahiri's writing is usually compelling. She has a subtle ear for dialogue and a knack for imaginative descriptions. "She would slouch in her chair, looking bothered but resigned, as if a subway she were riding had halted between stations." Death and mourning permeate most stories in this collection, including the three linked ones in the final section, but Lahiri's most successful piece, "Only Goodness", isn't quite so funereal. Sudha, a Bengali-American grad student at LSE, receives an unexpected letter from her estranged alcoholic brother, Rahul, a Cornell dropout. (Think Salinger's Franny and Zooey.) Sudha's elated by the note, but the reunification with her brother throws her relationship with her English husband, as well as her infant son's safety, into peril. This story towers over others in the collection, not only because of Lahiri's skilful, succinct prose, but also because the author liberates her writing from simplistic cultural baggage and allows her characters to breathe as individuals. What the characters in "Only Goodness" have in common with the rest of Lahiri's universe, however, is the fact that they all inhabit the most elite rungs of North American society, and this is her insurmountable weakness. Although many of her players are immigrants or are involved in inter-racial romances, they go to Harvard and expensive boarding schools; they study at Columbia's Butler Library and discuss Homer; they are doctors and academics - apart from the Bengali housewives, that is. The portrait of the US conjured up by this book is insular and antiquated and doesn't differ very much from the country evoked by Lahiri's crotchety New England predecessors. She fails to challenge the inadequacies of this elite America - the latent racism that underpins it - and, as a result, Unaccustomed Earth isn't a truly provocative or innovative American book. Hirsh Sawhney is the editor of Delhi Noir , forthcoming from Akashic Books. To order Unaccustomed Earth for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-lahiri.1 [Usha]'s mother is left heartbroken when [Pranab] decides to marry a white woman. At Pranab's wedding, [Lahiri] depicts various cultural clashes between Bengali and American cultures, a simplistic leftover from her previous work that enables her to spoon-feed western readers information about race and migration. Usha's father, she explains, works "through his meal, his fork and knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china, because he was accustomed to eating with his hands". His wife, on the other hand, behaves childishly, "speaking in Bengali, complaining about the formality of the proceedings". She is an archetypal female immigrant in Lahiri's world, anachronistic and disempowered. Death and mourning permeate most stories in this collection, including the three linked ones in the final section, but Lahiri's most successful piece, "Only Goodness", isn't quite so funereal. Sudha, a Bengali-American grad student at LSE, receives an unexpected letter from her estranged alcoholic brother, Rahul, a Cornell dropout. (Think Salinger's Franny and Zooey.) Sudha's elated by the note, but the reunification with her brother throws her relationship with her English husband, as well as her infant son's safety, into peril. This story towers over others in the collection, not only because of Lahiri's skilful, succinct prose, but also because the author liberates her writing from simplistic cultural baggage and allows her characters to breathe as individuals. - Hirsh Sawhney.
Library Journal Review
Eight stories of souls in upheaval, in settings that range from Seattle to Thailand. With an 11-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Unaccustomed Earth After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. They were package tours, traveling in the company of strangers, riding by bus through the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world. Occasionally a postcard would arrive in Seattle, where Ruma and Adam and their son Akash lived. The postcards showed the facades of churches, stone fountains, crowded piazzas, terra-cotta rooftops mellowed by late afternoon sun. Nearly fifteen years had passed since Ruma's only European adventure, a month-long EuroRail holiday she'd taken with two girlfriends after college, with money saved up from her salary as a para- legal. She'd slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now. Her father wrote succinct, impersonal accounts of the things he had seen and done: "Yesterday the Uffizi Gallery. Today a walk to the other side of the Arno. A trip to Siena scheduled tomorrow." Occasionally there was a sentence about the weather. But there was never a sense of her father's presence in those places. Ruma was reminded of the telegrams her parents used to send to their relatives long ago, after visiting Calcutta and safely arriving back in Pennsylvania. The postcards were the first pieces of mail Ruma had received from her father. In her thirty-eight years he'd never had any reason to write to her. It was a one-sided correspondence; his trips were brief enough so that there was no time for Ruma to write back, and besides, he was not in a position to receive mail on his end. Her father's penmanship was small, precise, slightly feminine; her mother's had been a jumble of capital and lowercase, as though she'd learned to make only one version of each letter. The cards were addressed to Ruma; her father never included Adam's name, or mentioned Akash. It was only in his closing that he acknowledged any personal connection between them. "Be happy, love Baba," he signed them, as if the attainment of happiness were as simple as that. In August her father would be going away again, to Prague. But first he was coming to spend a week with Ruma and see the house she and Adam had bought on the Eastside of Seattle. They'd moved from Brooklyn in the spring, for Adam's job. It was her father who suggested the visit, calling Ruma as she was making dinner in her new kitchen, surprising her. After her mother's death it was Ruma who assumed the duty of speaking to her father every evening, asking how his day had gone. The calls were less frequent now, normally once a week on Sunday afternoons. "You're always welcome here, Baba," she'd told her father on the phone. "You know you don't have to ask." Her mother would not have asked. "We're coming to see you in July," she would have informed Ruma, the plane tickets already in hand. There had been a time in her life when such presumptuousness would have angered Ruma. She missed it now. Adam would be away that week, on another business trip. He worked for a hedge fund and since the move had yet to spend two consecutive weeks at home. Tagging along with him wasn't an option. He never went anywhere interesting--usuall Excerpted from Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, Jhumpa Lahiri All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
