"Splendid . . . 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. . . . .
Lahiri's epigraph . . . from 'The Custom-House,' by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, [is] 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. . . . .
Except for their names, 'Hema and Kaushik' [the title characters of
the final trilogy of stories] 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 their 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."
-Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review (cover
review)
"Jhumpa Lahiri's characters tend to be immigrants from India and
their American-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries,
two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept
the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in
tradition to embrace American mores fully. . . . Ms. Lahiri writes
about these people in Unaccustomed Earth with an intimate
knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for
detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision .
. . A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a
reminder of Ms. Lahiri's appreciation of the wages of time and
mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that
plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and
friends. [Lahiri] deftly explicates the emotional arithmetic of her
characters' families . . . showing how some of the children
learn to sidestep, even defy, their parents' wishes. But she also
shows how haunted they remain by the burden of their families'
dreams and their awareness of their role in the generational
process of Americanization. . . The last three overlapping
tales tell a single story about a Bengali-American girl and a
Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing lives make up a poignant
ballad of love and loss and death. They embark on a passionate
affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with a
denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.
. . . an ending that possesses the elegiac and haunting power of
tragedy-a testament to Lahiri's emotional wisdom and consummate
artistry as a writer."
-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Stunning. [Lahiri] delves deeply and richly into the lives of
immigrants. [But though] immigrants may be the stories'
protagonists, their doubts, insecurities, losses and heartbreaks
belong to all of us. Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the
secrets of the human heart. . . . In part, Lahiri's gift to the
reader is gorgeous prose that bestows greatness on life's mundane
events and activities. But it is her exploration of lost love and
lost loved ones that gives her stories an emotional exactitude few
writers could ever hope to match."
-Carol Memmott, USA Today
"Shimmering . . . The literary prize committees should once again
take note . . . To read [Unaccustomed Earth] and only take
away an experience of cultural tourism would be akin to reading
Dante only to retain how medieval Italians slurped their spaghetti.
Lahiri's fiction delves deep into the universal theme of isolation.
. . . Lahiri is a lush writer bringing to life worlds through a
pile-up of detail. But somehow all that richness electrifyingly
evokes the void. . . . It's customary when reviewing short story
collections to adopt a 'one from column A, two from column B' kind
of structure-you know, the title story always gets a ritual nod,
followed by a run-down of which stories are the strongest, which
have just been included for filler. But another
stereotype-confounding aspect of Lahiri's writing is that there
aren't any weak stories here: every one seems like the best, the
most vivid, until you read the next one. . . . Lahiri ingeniously
reworks the situation of characters subsisting at point zero, of
being stripped down like Lear on the heath. [Unaccustomed
Earth] certainly makes a contribution to the
literature of immigration, but it also takes its rightful place
with modernist tales from whatever culture in which characters find
themselves doomed to try and fail to only connect."
-Maureen Corrigan, "Fresh Air"
"Profound . . . Powerful . . . Haunting . . . Lahiri's prose here
is deceptively simple, its mechanics invisible, as she enters into
her characters' innermost journeys. [In the title story,] the
moment-to-moment rendering of Ruma's vulnerability and her father's
rising panic at all that he's keeping secret sweeps the reader into
a compelling emotional landscape. . . . Lahiri invests [her
characters] with great depth. [She is] a writer working at the
height of her powers."
-Lisa Fugard, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Peripatetic, sweeping stories-Lahiri's best yet-which move from
Boston to Bombay and back again to evoke intricate topologies of
emotion and characters who often feel more at home abroad. [They]
possess the gravitational pull of short novels. . . . The final
three stories, a trilogy in which an educated, thoroughly American
girl's choice of an arranged marriage over romantic love (a
decision Lahiri deftly makes relatable) has cataclysmic
repercussions, form the rhapsodic culmination to the collection.
Lahiri, a master storyteller-who, along with Alice Munro, has
arguably done more to reinvigorate the once-moribund form than any
other contemporary English-language writer-comes full circle with
this book, imbued as it is with a sense of passage, of life and
death and rebirth."
-Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"Five of five stars. . . . Commanding and seamless . . . There
might not be a better book of fiction by an American writer
published this year. . . . Extraordinary . . . The long, absorbing
'Unaccustomed Earth,' the title story [deals with] familiar themes
[for Lahiri]: the alienation that Indian immigrant parents feel
toward their American-reared children and the guilt those children
feel as they assimilate into the melting pot of the U.S. But as she
proved in Interpreter of Maladies and The
Namesake, Lahiri writes so compellingly about these conflicts
and pays such careful attention to the most emotionally telling of
details that each story feels freshly minted. . . . The range of
human experiences [Lahiri] chronicles is epic, again and again.
['Hell-Heaven' is] a universal story of yearning and unrequited
desire, rooted so specifically and powerfully in a sense of time
and place that we feel as if we are living right alongside the
characters . . . For all that's comfortingly familiar about
Unaccustomed Earth, though, one of its chief pleasures is
that it shows Lahiri stretching in entirely new directions. In 'A
Choice of Accommodations,' for instance, the author serves up a
slice of Updike-ian Americana while managing to put her own
distinct twist on the proceedings. . . . 'Only Goodness,' arguably
the strongest story in the collection, gets under your skin like
nothing Lahiri has written before. The first five stories are
varied and accomplished [and the final three] are gripping and
affecting . . . Whereas so many story collections feel like uneven
grab-bags, Unaccustomed Earth seems to have poured forth
from the author's pen in one swoop, and it eloquently circles back
over the same sets of themes and motifs without growing tired. It's
like a symphony in eight movements."
-Christopher Kelly, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Four stars. Jhumpa Lahiri continues to probe culture and
generational clashes among Bengali brethren living in the U.S. (and
occasionally abroad) in her penetrating second collection . . . No
character exists in isolation in Lahiri's new work, which is deeply
aware of the power of blood ties; her book is a congregation of
siblings, parents, spouses. Neither an exultation of nuclear
families nor a cynical catalog of their dysfunction,
Unaccustomed Earth is something braver and more difficult:
a compassionate inspection of the fissures and disappointments of
deep attachment. . . . trenchant. Whether they are middle-aged
mothers who tire of years of keeping house in small Northeastern
towns, thousands of miles away from Calcutta, or sisters who
finally relinquish responsibility for alcoholic younger brothers,
these characters are somehow redeemed by their courage to face the
day, 'as typical and terrifying as any other.'"
-Melissa Anderson, Time Out New York
"[Lahiri's] stories are quiet, deliberate, setting one foot down
in front of the other, then exploding with a secret, an encounter,
a clash. Quietly, then, they lay back down, leaving the reader
astir in their unnerving calm. Lahiri's [work], however, is rife
with characters that are larger than the Bengali immigration
experience, experiences larger than mere discontent. She's an
artist of the family portrait. The eight stories in
Unaccustomed Earth have an emotional wisdom weightier than
in Lahiri's first collection, Interpreter of Maladies,
which won the Pulitzer Prize, and they contain a more nuanced
tightness than her neo-Chekhovian first novel, The
Namesake . . . Her new stories are better, stronger-evidence
of a writer pushing herself to a deeper level. . . . Old-fashioned
in her approach, contemporary in her subject matter, Lahiri anchors
these stories in character. . . . In ['Unaccustomed Earth' and
'Only Goodness'], new life brings hope to broken families, and
mothers awash in tears must carry on when the baby cries. [Lahiri]
captures these moments with clarity and grace, a tangible knowledge
of how souls twist in the wind. . . . The 'Hema and Kaushik'
stories, a trilogy that closes the book, prove the most haunting.
The characters, Lahiri has said in interviews, lived with her for a
decade, and their presence feels imprinted in these pages as if by
letterpress. . . . In these three stories, Lahiri experiments with
point of view. Forsaking her usual third-person narrator, she goes
for the intimate whispers of first person. If one felt like a
fortunate fly on the wall in previous stories, now the effect is to
sit in between the beats of her characters' heartaches."
-Leonora Todaro, The Village Voice
"Lahiri writes largely about the American-born children of
middle-class Indian immigrants, but in doing so, she also nails the
mores of affluent, educated Americans, both Indian and non-Indian.
['Only Goodness'] presents a very believable picture of a
relationship's slow decline in a very recognizable urban setting.
And that's precisely what Lahiri does well. . . . Lahiri is a
literary heir of Anthony Trollope in her ability to capture the way
we live now. And that's a testament to the way society has changed
. . . but also to Lahiri's skill at evoking this world
empathetically and unironically."
-Adelle Waldman, The New Republic
"Eight stories [that] are longer than those in [Lahiri's] previous
collection but just as absorbing and beautifully written. . . .
Wonderful prose and masterful delineation of character.
[Unaccustomed Earth] fulfills every expectation of her
mastery of the prose medium. . . . Unaccustomed Earth is
[Lahiri's] customary style at its very best."
-Nancy Schapiro, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Beautifully crafted . . . Lahiri navigates the interlocking themes
of identity and assimilation, familial duty and grief . . .
employ[ing] quiet language to reveal debilitating truths. . . .
Unaccustomed Earth showcases some of Lahiri's best work
and reinforces her claim to our literary high ground."
-Tamara Titus, The Charlotte Observer
"'Eagerly awaited' is a phrase too often used to hype a new work.
But in the case of Lahiri, it's accurate. Lahiri again delicately
writes of the Bengali immigrant experience, perfectly communicating
the tension between the ideals of transplanted parents and the ones
of their American children, in the short story format that made her
so popular in the first place."
-Billy Heller, The New York Post
"Poignant . . . precisely rendered, elegiac . . . Lahiri details
with quiet precision the divide between American-born children and
their Bengali parents."
-Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
"Four stars. Beautifully rendered . . . Unaccustomed
Earth explores the dilemmas faced by Bengali immigrants in the
west, yet its appeal is universal. Lahiri takes the reader from
Massachusetts to Italy to London to Thailand as her characters
discover love, freedom and the heartbreak of leaving one family to
create another. In the standout title story, a lawyer on maternity
leave struggles with her mother's death and her own ambivalence
toward motherhood. 'Only Goodness,' about the complexity of loving
an addict, contains a darkness that proves the author capable of
leaving her usual realm, quiet domestic tragedy, for rougher
waters. Reading her stories is hypnotizing-like falling into a
dream where colors are brighter, smells sharper and time moves more
slowly than in real life."
-Danielle Trussoni, People
"Lovely . . . elegant, unsettling . . . Unaccustomed
Earth is full of lost old-world parents and the modern
marriages that can't quite replace them. . . . The saga of Hema and
Kaushik is . . . a masterfully written and powerful drama. Though
Lahiri's characters construct sophisticated new identities for
themselves, they are still irresistibly drawn to the reassuring
traditions they've abandoned. The past exerts a wicked pull, even
(maybe especially) when you're all grown up and least expecting
it."
-Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"[Jhumpa Lahiri is] a succinct realist writer in an era of
attention-getting maneuvers. Stylistically, [there's] no genre
bending, no comics-inflected supernaturalism, no world-historical
ventriloquism, no 9/11 flip books. Just couples and families
joining, coming apart, dealing with immigration, death, and
estrangement. This is true of her debut short-story collection,
Interpreter of Maladies (which won a Pulitzer in 2000);
her novel, The Namesake (a best seller turned Mira Nair
film); and her new book, Unaccustomed Earth-eight mature
stories each stretching almost to novella length. . . . What makes
Lahiri's corner of the world seem so important, to her and to us?
Maybe, for all the polish, it's the lack of ironic layering that
tends to distance us from the tragedies chronicled in most
'literary' fiction. Lahiri isn't afraid to make people cry. . . .
Lahiri writes often of illnesses, failing marriages, and just plain
loneliness, but thanks to her economy and mastery of detail, it
never quite crosses over into the sentimental. Nor does it rely on
the melodramatic twists that are staples of more middlebrow
writers. "
-Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
"Jhumpa Lahiri already has carved out a distinctive literary
niche . . . her tales of Indians encountering contemporary American
lives have resonated with a wide swath of readers. Unaccustomed
Earth will only burnish that estimable reputation. It's an
emotionally astute, character-driven assortment of stories that
carry forward and deepen the themes she's explored in her previous
works. . . . Her prose style is graceful, elegant, understated.
Like Alice Munro, Lahiri is adept at handling chronology, ranging
backward and forward in time, compressing lifetimes into a single
artfully crafted paragraph. Relish this gorgeous collection."
-Harvey Freedenberg, Bookpage
"Emotionally intricate and exquisitely crafted, Unaccustomed
Earth's descriptions of love and conflict are rendered through
the lives of people whose traditions include arranged marriages and
cultural cohesion. Much of the older generation seeks to honor
tradition, and the younger seeks to explore personal choices. . . .
One of Lahiri's great strengths is to concentrate myriad conflicts
into individual scenes where cultural, romantic and family betrayal
coalesce. Like Jane Austen, Lahiri is brilliant at describing
ambivalent emotions. . . . Stories of star-crossed lovers are not
new, but when handled by Lahiri in the book's second section, 'Hema
and Kaushik' becomes a nearly perfect example of the linked story
form. The stories are so richly detailed in their accounting of
time, and so socially layered, that the meeting feels convincingly
like destiny . . . Masterful."
-John Holman, Paste
"Ferociously good . . . acutely observed . . . In exquisitely
attuned prose, Lahiri notes the clash between generations . . . She
is emotionally precise about her characters and the way the world
appears to them, especially in the superb 'Hema and Kaushik'
[trilogy], which achingly reveals how two very unlikely families
end up under one suburban roof, and how destiny entwines them
forever. These are unforgettable people, their stories
unforgettably well told."
-Elaina Richardson, O, The Oprah Magazine
"A great book . . . to move you. Whether American or Bengali by
birth, Lahiri's protagonists valiantly walk a tightrope between
personal choice and family expectation. Faltering or triumphant,
each tugs at the heart."
-Good Housekeeping
"[Lahiri] explores with her modulated prose a full range of
relationships among her subjects. So thoroughly and judiciously
does she use detail that she easily presents entire lives with each
story. These are tales of careful observation and adjustment . . .
Most moving is the final trio of intertwined stories about loss and
connection."
-The Atlantic
"Dazzling . . . [Lahiri's] comparisons with literary masters such
as Alice Munro are well-earned. In these eight exquisitely detailed
stories, Lahiri is less interested in painful family conflicts than
in the private moments of sadness that come in their aftermath. In
the outstanding title story, a woman struggles to reconnect with
her father and to accept how he has changed since her mother's
death. In 'A Choice of Accommodations,' Lahiri writes refreshingly
about an aging body . . . Subtle and wise, Lahiri captures a
universal yearning."
-Carmela Ciuraru, More
"Lahiri's finely drawn prose makes [Unaccustomed Earth]
feel less like reading and more like peering into the most raw,
intimate moments of people's lives."
-Marie Claire
"Lahiri has boasted an enviable literary career since nabbing the
Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies. Her new story
collection, Unaccustomed Earth, should have no problem
upholding her reputation . . . Lahiri delves into the souls of
indelible characters struggling with displacement, guilt, and fear
as they try to find a balance between the solace and suffocation of
tradition and the terror and excitement of the future into which
they're being thrust. . . . [Unaccustomed Earth] further
establishes her as an important American writer."
-Kera Bolonik, Bookforum
"Lahiri's enormous gifts as a storyteller are on full
display in this collection: the gorgeous, effortless prose; the
characters haunted by regret, isolation, loss, and tragedies big
and small; and most of all, a quiet, emerging sense of
humanity."
-Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns and
The Kite Runner
"Pulitzer Prize winning Lahiri returns with her highly anticipated
second collection exploring the inevitable tension brought on by
family life. The title story takes on a young mother nervously
hosting her widowed father, who is visiting between trips he takes
with a lover he has kept secret from his family. What could have
easily been a melodramatic soap opera is instead a meticulously
crafted piece that accurately depicts the intricacies of the
father-daughter relationship. In a departure from Interpreter
of Maladies, Lahiri divides this book into two parts, devoting
the second half to "Hema and Kaushik," three stories that together
tell the story of a young man and woman who meet as children and
reunite years later halfway around the world. The author's ability
to flesh out completely even minor characters in every story, and
especially in this trio of stories, is what will keep readers
invested in the work until its heartbreaking conclusion.
Recommended for all public libraries."
-Sybil Kollappallil, Library Journal
"The tight arc of a story is perfect for Lahiri's keen sense of
life's abrupt and powerful 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 a 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. Lahiri writes insightfully about childhood, while
the romantic infatuations and obstacles to true love will captivate
teens."
-Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred)
"Stunning . . . 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 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 . . . 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."
-Publishers Weekly (starred) (January 28, 2008)
"Lahiri extends her mastery of the short-story in a collection that
has a novel's thematic cohesion, narrative momentum and depth of
character. . . . Some of her most compelling fiction to date. Each
of these eight stories . . . concerns the assimilation of Bengali
characters into American society. The parents feel a tension
between the culture they've left behind and the adopted homeland
where they always feel at least a little foreign. Their offspring,
who are generally the protagonists of these stories, are typically
more Americanized, adopting a value system that would scandalize
their parents, who are usually oblivious to the college lives their
sons and daughters lead. . . . The stunning title story presents
something of a role reversal, as a Bengali daughter and her
American husband must come to terms with the secrets harbored by
her father. The story expresses as much about love, loss and the
family ties that stretch across continents and generations through
what it doesn't say, and through what is left unaddressed by the
characters. . . . An eye for detail, ear for dialogue and command
of family dynamics distinguish this uncommonly rich
collection."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred) (February 1, 2008)
From the Hardcover edition.