|
| Unaccustomed Earth | 
 enlarge | Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Random House Large Print Publishing
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  122 reviews
Sales Rank: 4441931
Format: Large Print
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
ISBN: 0739327720
EAN: 9780739327722
ASIN: 0739327720
Publication Date: April 2008
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.
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 keepingall 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.
Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 117 more reviews...
 Simple. Sparse. Perfection April 12, 2008
120 out of 138 found this review helpful
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn out soil. My children ... shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." This quote, which was a revelation to me, so much so that I redid my work e-mail "inspiration quote" signature to put it it, is the inspiration of Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories called "Unaccustomed Earth".
This is the first book I have read of hers, and it simply does not disappoint. Eight stories are so intricately woven with their words and themes that each in itself is a beautiful work of art, and yet together, form the basis of a masterpiece. Former author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake (movie tie-in edition), Lahiri's carrying on her success with this new bunch. The book starts with the story named after the book, a story about a Bengali woman named Ruma and her father who comes to visit her from Pennsylvania. Cultures and expectations collide as these two virtual strangers learn to exist with each other without the familiar glue of her mother, who passed away only months before. A garden, her mixed race son, and a secret love, permeate the layers of this opening story that literally leave you breathless by stories end. Similar themes are woven through the other seven stories, some which I liked more than others, but all of them written with such scope and craft.
Reading a story written by Lahiri is like sitting in a well ordered, immaculate living room, with a rich, fragrant onion sitting in front of you. As you delve into the story, you peel back the layers of the onion, and the exactitude and preciseness of her stories marvel, and the scent of the onion, not bitter or harsh, but rich and alluring, fill that perfect room, so much so that by the end, all of yours senses are heightened, and you may possibly have tears in your eyes.
It's as if Lahiri wrote her stories, and took a literary comb and brushed out all of the extra verbs, nouns, and adjectives (most which can clutter today's fiction), leaving only the essential words behind, creating an exquisite picture. People have compared Lahiri's writing to Hemingway. I sense more of Michael Cunningham, who also strives for leximic precision. Both Cunningham and Lahiri's writing is character centered, creates worlds of inner conflict, and flows like a beautiful river.
After just reading the first story, I told five people of this marvelous new book, and highly recommend you to that if you want to marvel in the worlds created by Lahiri, this is the perfect place to start.
 Pleasant, but not brilliant prose April 14, 2008
95 out of 117 found this review helpful
I don't want to criticize Jhumpa for always choosing the same milieu and the same class of Ivy League privileged Bengali families in the US. It's all well known and she doesn't try to deny it. But what seems most disappointing about her writing is that we have the impression she is constantly recycling the same characters, who although sometimes flawed, always seem somewhat too well planned out and not real enough. They want to live beyond the constraints of their cultural up-bringing, but they never really expand their experience beyond occasionally marrying an American. The short story that stood out the most for me was "Nobody's business" where the author finally strays from the usual plot; that of a mixed marriage, but the plot still seems to dance around marriage and education.
Ms Lahiri's writing is mostly quite pleasant, skilled and at times a brilliantly put together prose, yet it lacks luster or humor. The characters, like the story lines are always on the verge of exploding, on the verge of something meaningful happing to them, yet they always stop short and the endings inevitably seem underwhelming.
The emotions that she tries so hard to elicit in the reader feel contrived. Having read numerous comparisons to Alice Munro, I was expecting much more, but if you are looking for an enjoyable read on the plane, I'd whole heartedly recommend it.
Accustomed to Success - A Fine Collection of Eight Short Stories April 3, 2008
47 out of 56 found this review helpful
With UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Jhumpa Lahiri can lay claim with good reason to being the finest short story writer in America today. This book, her second collection of short stories with the full-length novel THE NAMESAKE sandwiched between, is a masterful collection of affecting tales about family life and individual self-discovery. While Lahiri's focus is relentlessly drawn toward what might be termed the "Bengali-American experience," her stories express rich underlying elements of universality, allowing them to transcend the mere "new American immigrant" genre. She shows yet again that she is a marvelous craftswoman of the short story art form and its language (words, imagery, and symbolism).
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH is eight stories, divided into two sections. The first section contains five distinct short stories, beginning with the near-novella length title story that is certainly the collection's finest. In that piece, a daughter of Indian descent, Ruma, welcomes her unexpectedly widowered father with trepidation to her new home in Seattle. Ruma is married to a Caucasian named Adam, and they have a young son named Akash. In every respect the young family is a model of mixed marriage and, in Ruma's case, full cultural assimilation. Nevertheless, her father's visit promises to force Ruma to confront the inevitable fissures that appear between first and second generation immigrant families. Travel to new countries or settling into new lands, postcards of foreign places, the soil in gardening, and measurement of distances all serve in symbolic support to the story's title, but it is a simple misplaced and unmailed postcard that pulls everything together into a poignant ending.
Lahiri's other four stories in the first section have similar themes. In "Hell-Heaven," a young woman recalls her childhood when a fellow Bengali became a family friend and part of her (and, surprisingly, her mother's) life. In "A Choice of Accommodation," (another title laden with multiple meanings), a middle-aged, mixed marriage couple (Amit and Megan) rediscover themselves and a bit of their previously unstated history during a friend's wedding held at Amit's old boarding school. In "Only Goodness," a model Bengali daughter named Sudha, married and a new mother, tries to cope with her younger brother Rahul's alcoholic failings and her likely role in making him what he has become. Of all the characters in this book, it is Rahul who comes across most powerfully.
The second part of the book contains three intertwined stories involving two characters, one female and one male, at different stages of their lives. Hema and Kaushik are first thrown together by circumstances of the latter's parents having relocated to India and then returned to the Boston area. Hema's family agrees to put Kaushik's family up until they can find a new house of their own, turning Hema's life upside down and even tossing her from her bedroom (now occupied by the three-year-older Kaushik) and onto a cot in her parents room. Tragedy looms behind these events, but it is one which Hema's family is not aware. The first story is told from Hema's viewpoint, the second about three years later from Kaushik's, and the third about twenty years later from both viewpoints. As with her opening story "Unaccustomed Earth," Lahiri finds an ending that, while somewhat contrived, is nonetheless touching.
It is only in this final piece, "Going Ashore" (again a title with multiple meanings), that Lahiri brings her narratives into the present day. The earlier stories appear to take place mostly in about the 1980's, with references to VCR's and record players and telephones with long extension cords. They seem oddly removed from everyday reality, as if they represented a sort of wistful backward stare at a different era, to a time when America was still a shining light on a hill and India was a place to escape before the Internet age and globalization changed some of the balance in their relationship. By the time of "Going Ashore," both Hema and Kaushik are adrift in global waters, world citizens who travel freely, lack strong personal attachments, and exist without the roots of family and place and culture that those of the prior generation clearly demonstrated in the earlier stories. Even their careers are disassociative: Hema's as a researcher of the ancient Etruscan civilization, Kaushik's as a photographer of world events who stands forever outside the very events whose images he captures.
If I had one criticism of UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, it would be Lahiri's seemingly incessant focus on one group of Bengalis, the academically-striving, economically prosperous, high achievers. Story after story expresses variations on the same themes from among the same types of people. Lahiri offers repeated mixed marriages (Ruma and Adam, Pranab and Deborah, Amit and Megan, Sudha and Roger Featherstone, Rahul and Elena). Nearly everyone is a PhD - perhaps that is what makes Rahul and Kaushik seem so refreshingly real - and everyone is an academic overachiever whose alma maters would make even US News & World Report blush - Princeton, MIT, Radcliffe, Harvard Medical School, Columbia, U Penn, London School of Economics, Cornell, NYU, Bryn Mawr, Tufts, Colgate, Swarthmore. One character has actually been slumming as a physics professor at Michigan State, but thankfully he's finally on his way to the more acceptable MIT. There must be other Bengalis in America worth writing about, and there must be other stories that do not lead one to paraphrase Tolstoy with, "Every happy Bengali family is alike, and every unhappy Bengali family is also unhappy in the same way."
Here's hoping that Ms. Lahiri can apply her brilliant writing skills (...clusters of swallows like giant thumbprints swiping the sky...") to a broader canvas in future works; the results promise to be stunning. In the meantime, be pleased as a reader to sit quietly and relish a master at work in these eight compelling and emotionally satisfying short stories. They are well worth the time.
Flawlessly written stories about regret April 4, 2008
40 out of 47 found this review helpful
There is nothing flashy about author Jhumpa Lahiri's writing. It's simply true. She writes flawlessly about secrets held close, about heartbreak and regret. At the end of each of these quiet stories, you feel an emotional wallop.
The characters invariably include a person or persons of Indian descent -- usually a Bengali. I was unfamiliar with Indian culture when I began reading Unaccustomed Earth, but it didn't hurt my enjoyment or understanding. The stories are universal. You only need to be human to relate to the characters and their situations.
My heart ached for these people, because I recognized them. The retired widower yearning for a new life. The silent mother hiding a broken heart. The charming brother giving in to weakness, ruining all that is good. These people could easily be my relatives, my closest of friends, or yours. Everyone has a secret to hide. Everyone regrets.
Although the stories are often sad, they always ring true. This book is an empathetic look at what it is to be human.
 "My children ... shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." April 18, 2008
36 out of 47 found this review helpful
Ever since the publication of her mesmerizing, Pulitzer Prize winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri has established herself as one of modern fiction's most powerful voices. The stories in that collection showcased what was to become Lahiri's trademark: acute psychological observations, eloquent writing, detailed descriptions, and a fiercely intelligent structure. As in poetry, each word feels carefully chosen, yet the overall ease with which the narratives flow belies the effort that undoubtedly went into them. "Interpreter of Maladies" also served to debut Lahiri's dominant theme in that each story featured Indian characters struggling to adapt to new surroundings after immigrating to the U.S. Her sophomore effort, The Namesake: A Novel expanded this theme into a wonderful full-length novel about the gap between a boy born and raised in America and his immigrant parents, who cling to their old traditions and ways of life. Lahiri, who was herself born in London but raised in New England, has made a career out of telling stories of cultural displacement, and until now she never once faltered when it came to crafting a powerful story.
"Unaccustomed Earth" marks Lahiri's return to the short story format, and while I had been looking forward to it with high anticipation, the product is surprising. Perhaps Lahiri succeeded at the transition from short stories to novels a little too well, because suddenly it feels like she has much more to say in an all-too-limited page count. The shortest story in the collection is "Hell-Heaven," which at twenty-four pages would have been right at home in "Interpreter of Maladies," and while it is one of the better offerings it feels clipped, as though there was so much more to say and not enough time to say it. Instead, the stories in "Unaccustomed Earth" verge on novella territory, allowing Lahiri to indulge in the slow-burn style she perfected in "The Namesake". The last three stories interlock to tell a single story in three parts, completing this effect. There aren't many authors who are at their best when they take their time, but Lahiri seems to be one of them. But this is a minor complaint.
I do, however, have more pointed concerns after reading Lahiri's latest work. Firstly, she seems to have acquired a taste for the melodramatic that doesn't suit her elegant style at all. Lahiri's writing is always very restrained when it comes to emotions, which is one of her strong suits, so when she indulges in plot contrivances such as alcoholism and abusive relationships it feels forced and more than a little jarring. Quiet desperation is more apt for her style; it is what makes it feel so authentic. Melodrama makes it feel theatrical. The high points of "Unaccustomed Earth" are its beginning and ending, "Unaccustomed Earth" and the saga of Hema and Kaushik, which notably steer clear of these plot elements. Luckily, Lahiri seems incapable of writing anything that doesn't maintain a grip on realism, but it still felt out of place to this reader.
Secondly, Lahiri's characters are starting to suffer from a degree of sameness. Perhaps that is why she infused the melodrama that I just discussed into the collection's middle section, but the fact that each character seems to have an ivy-league education and a doctorate and strikingly similar back stories still begins to feel stultifying.
Despite these complaints, Lahiri remains one of the most psychologically astute writers out there, and her keen plotting and pointed observations make "Unaccustomed Earth" tower head and shoulders above most other literary offerings. And even though I feel warier about what direction her next book will take, I still have the utmost faith in her abilities and look forward to it with the same degree of anticipation that I waited for "Unaccustomed Earth".
Grade: B+
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
