Unaccustomed Earth
I had read the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and then put the book down for almost half a year while my life knotted and unknotted. The pace of the story and the detachment of tone didn’t work with my temporary roller coaster. But I returned to it this week and read the stories quickly and fluidly, requesting that everyone stop asking anything of me, that the plane stay up in the air, until I finished one story and then the next.
I fell instantly in love with Jhumpa Lahiri’s first short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. I remember reading almost the whole thing in a bookstore, transfixed by the seeming simplicity and clearness of tone and the necessity of each tiny detail. At the risk of sounding stereotypical, because really I don’t know as much about literature as I wish I did, a lot of women of Indian descent writing in English today have the most lyrical, poetic style of writing that I’ve seen. If I had to read one book on repeat, it might be Arundahti Roy’s God of Small Things. It makes me wish that I had in my brain both poetry and plot. It makes me want to write. Same with Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.
But Jhumpa Lahiri is the opposite. She is cool, calm, sparse. I found this to not work for me in her book The Namesake, her first novel. Something about the form of the novel — all that room, abundance, that mess — didn’t allow her to focus on the symbolism in everyday details like her short stories do. I felt bored when I read it. But the short story that led her to that novel, which appeared first in a New Yorker, was gorgeous and whole enough without unraveling into the novel form. In Unaccustomed Earth, I was glad to see her return to short stories. And a new form: the second half of the book had a string of short stories that together connected into one whole. (But why only the second half? It made the form of the collection feel patched.) The book feels necessary, though I didn’t love it. It filled a cultural space: to understand more the complications of transplanting from one country to another, and the pain between two generations — one born in American and one born in India, and the need to both attach to the past and free oneself from it.
