My library sent me a friendly reminder today that my copy of Unaccustomed Earth is due back Saturday. They’re not messing around with these “express read” rules apparently. Every day late costs $1, so I better get cracking. I’m about a third of a way through the second to last story, so I should get finished with time to spare. I did skip one story, only because I’ve read it before: “Nobody’s Business” originally ran in the New Yorker in 2001 and was included in the Best American Short Story collection from 2002. I own that collection, and so just a few sentences into that story, it started to sound familiar. Granted, I could have reread it, but with the library clock ticking, I decided not to.
Anyway, I popped around the Web a little to find out more about Jhumpa and her latest work.
Turns out it is already up for one significant award (as is another book on my 2009 list).
Winner is announced on March 4.
An important debate rages in India on whether of not she is a “thinking man’s sex symbol.
Men are silly. She’s beautiful. What’s there to debate?
Article from March 2008 Atlantic, in which Jhumpa talks about how she tries to keep her fiction “plain.”
I like it to be plain. It appeals to me more. There’s form and there’s function and I have never been a fan of just form. My husband and I always have this argument because we go shopping for furniture and he always looks at chairs that are spectacular and beautiful and unusual, and I never want to get a chair if it isn’t comfortable. I don’t want to sit around and have my language just be beautiful. If you read Nabokov, who I love, the language is beautiful but it also makes the story and is an integral part of the story. Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can.
Article from May 2008 Time piece that wondered how Unaccustomed Earth shot to No. 1 on the bestseller list.
How about… it’s really good? The write offers a nice breakdown of how Jhumpa’s fiction works. I kind of wish there was a diagram to go with this passage:
Lahiri is a miniaturist, a microcosmologist, and she helps us understand what those lives mean without resorting to we-are-the-world multiculturalism. Everyone in Lahiri’s fiction is pulled in at least six directions at once. Parents pull characters backward in time; children pull them forward. America pulls them west; India pulls them east. The need to marry pulls them outward; the need for solitude pulls them inward. Lahiri’s stories are static, but what looks like stasis is really the stillness of enormous forces pushing in opposite directions, barely keeping one another in check.
Can’t you see it?
Another writer tries to wrap Lahiri up into a nice little package in March 2008’s New York Magazine.
Her heroes are Chekhov, Hardy, William Trevor, and Alice Munro. Surrounded by acolytes of Rushdie or DeLillo, she’s a traditionalist.
OK, the baby is crying, “Mmmmoomm, mmmummm, mmmuuuu, mmmooom.” I think he needs me.
A Year of Reading 