|
Reviewed
by Vanessa Gebbie
Of
the eight stories in this collection the title story is my favourite.
Four or five reads in and Unaccustomed
Earth still gives up its treasures, as each scene seems to
contain more and more images and references that deepen the whole. And
yet nothing seems placed. This writer’s style appears natural and
effortless. The prose flows by smoothly, beautifully. The central
character of this story, the first in the collection, is Ruma, a lawyer
and second- generation Bengali living in the USA. She is married to an
American. They have a child, Akash, who is three, and she is pregnant
again. She is very isolated. Her husband’s work has moved them to
Seattle, where she knows no one, and Ruma has given up work to look
after Akash before he goes to school. Despite herself, she finds
herself living the life she was determined to rise above: “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 husband is away for
a week, and she is visited for the first time since her mother’s
unexpected death, by her widowed father. The story contains moments of
aching poignancy as memories rise up and as Ruma and her father seek to
find comfortable common ground. The story switches seamlessly between
their two points of view, and between story present and memory. Lahiri
explores with great tenderness what it is to be pulled in different
directions in the small struggles that surface for them both each day
of her father’s short visit.
Lahiri
knows about children. Akash is a wonderful little character, the
perfect catalyst to allow his mother and his grandfather to discover
things about each other that they do not want to reveal openly. There
are many types of unaccustomed earth, literal and metaphorical. Ruma’s
garden, untended and bare, is planted by her father during his visit,
with help (both hilariously and movingly) from Akash. After her
father’s departure, I like to think that the garden will
thrive.
The
isolation and disempowerment of Ruma sets the theme for the collection.
In Hell Heaven,
we have a switch to a first person narration in a much shorter story,
exploring the narrator’s role as chaperone to her own mother when the
mother becomes infatuated with a visitor. Here it is the mother’s
isolation that takes centre stage. In A Choice of Accommodation
the central character is Amit, who returns to his old boarding school
with his American wife, for a wedding. Amit had been the "only Indian
student" at the school, “…he was crippled with homesickness, missing
his parents to the point where tears often filled his eyes, in those
first months, without warning.” His own marriage is stale. The wedding
is that of a girl he once had a crush on. In Hell Heaven and A Choice of Accommodation,
the final scenes are surprising, upping the relatively quiet tempo of
both narratives.
It
is this quietness that characterizes Lahiri’s work. Nowhere do you find
sharp twists and turns, soundbites or authorial tricks. The stories are
simply good. The prose is simply good. There is no need for this writer
to fall back on shock tactics of any sort to get noticed. Although
there is one use of the "f" word… and when it comes it does shock. That
is refreshing!
In
Only Goodness,
we meet Sudha. Her struggle is with an alcoholic brother. I must admit,
there was a moment in this story when I questioned the placid somewhat
lukewarm reactions Sudha has to even life-threatening events… but she
was, like all the rest, believable for all that. It added to her
detachment. I had the same sense at one point in the next story, Nobody’s Business,
when the characters seemed extraordinarily well-behaved in stressful
situations. And I think this is one of the dangers of reading this
writer’s work in snatched moments. Unless she is read quietly, slowly,
some of the emotion that rests beneath the words finds it hard to break
through to the surface.
The
last three stories in this collection are set apart and are a triptych
containing the same two central characters, Hema and Kaushik. They
almost make a novella. Whereas many reviewers have found these stories
the most satisfying, I do not agree. The first part, Once in Lifetime,
is a first person narration, one character addressing the other, and I
found it initially hard to sink into a narration in which one character
tells the other about their own past… which I figured they would know
anyway. It became too transparent a device. “Your parents were seasoned
immigrants … they had left India in 1962 … your father had a PhD, he
drove a car, a silver Saab with bucket seats to his job at an
engineering firm in Andover…”.
As
with many of the stories in Unaccustomed
Earth, these stories focus partly on the back stories of
the previous generation, related through the eyes of the "children".
This device allows us to see the distances that have been traveled,
geographically and culturally, in order for the characters to have
arrived at the narrative present, but it sets up a mild dissonance for
me. Its success rests on the readers acceptance that the parents are
characters who would be open to their children about events in their
past. Including the communication of feelings and emotions. But there
seemed to be a degree of formality between the generations in these
stories, and I was not always 100% convinced this would be the
case.
Having
said that, however, it just shows how good this book is. It is still
one of the best collections of short stories I have read. Lahiri
credits William Trevor with being one of her inspirations… and her
style is reminiscent of his. This is quality stuff. It is a book you
will keep on your shelves and return to time and time again, and if as
a writer, I can learn from her, I will.
Choosing
a quotation from Unaccustomed
Earth was not easy; it is not a book that gives up
soundbites without a struggle. In the end, the quotation above
describes in some way the tone of Unaccustomed
Earth. At no time does the reader find themselves in the
presence of a writer who goes for a fast effect. This is not a book for
the quickly-snatched moments for which short stories are meant to be
ideal. But then I have never agreed with that. Great short stories
reveal their layers more and more with each reading, none more so than
those in this collection.
If
you approach this collection thinking to skim for plot, however, you
will be vastly disappointed, and will wonder what all the fuss is
about. But then, I trust no one who reads The Short Review reads like
that!
Read one of the stories
from this collection on NewYorker.com.
Vanessa
Gebbie
is a writer, editor and Creative Writing tutor. Her own fiction is
widely published and has won many awards (Bridport, Fish, Daily
Telegraph, Per Contra among others.) her debut collection Words
from a Glass Bubble (Salt Publishing 2008) was nominated for
the Frank O’Connor Award. She is also Assistant Editor of Cadenza
Magazine, and founded The Fiction Workhouse, an online meeting place
for writers. She lives in Sussex, UK. |
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication
Date:
2008
Paperback/Hardback? Hardback
First
collection?: No
Awards: Winner,
Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize
Author
bio: Jhumpa
Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies.
Her second book, a novel, The
Namesake, was made into an acclaimed film. Unaccustomed Earth
has won many accolades, including the richest award for short story
collections in the world, the Frank O’Connor Prize. Jhumpa Lahiri was
born in England of Bengali parents. She moved to the USA as a child and
now lives there with her husband and children.
Buy this book (used or
new) from:
The
Publisher's Website: Bloomsbury
AbeBooks
Amazon
Powell's
BetterWorldBooks.Com
And...don't
forget your local booksellers and independent book shops! Visit IndieBound.org to find an independent bookstore near
you in the US
If
you liked this book you might also like....
Jhumpa Lahiri "Interpreter of Maladies" Anything by William Trevor What
other reviewers thought:
The Guardian New York Times Iced tea B Entertainment Weekly Blowin' In the Wind New York Review of Books The Independent Bookfox
|
