by Jhumpa Lahiri. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2013.
I didn’t intend to really write anything about Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book, The Lowland, since I’ve already read so many other reviews about it and wasn’t sure I’d have anything new or insightful to add to those discussions. Still, I thought I’d mention some bits that particularly stood out to me.
I found the first fifty pages or so disconcertingly slow. But after the main storyline shifts to America, I couldn’t stop (anyone else have Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby children’s books still virtually memorized? Ramona’s book report: “I can’t believe I read the whoooole thing”). Lahiri is excellent – as she is in her other books – when she describes American scenes and landscapes through a newcomer’s viewpoint, simultaneously evoking a sense of the foreign and the familiar. Main character Subhash and his wife Gauri move to Rhode Island, and the salt marshes and windy beaches and white clapboard churches are instantly recognizable to anyone who has been to New England. Yet the scenes are dramatically opposed to the crowds and humidity of their previous home near Calcutta, so the mentions of Rhode Island’s cold rain or eating beef stew seem new and refreshing.
Lahiri’s portrayal of these day-to-day challenges and adventures, as well as the broader existential ones, is why I would love to see one of her books as a selection for a Jewish/synagogue book group. What would be the comparisons with various Jewish immigrant experiences? It would probably be a lot of fun to share those. I think that the fact that Lahiri is not explicitly describing the Jewish-American experience would create a fresh environment for discussion, and lend a new view on old – but still important and valuable – cliches.
“She had an hour, she told Dipankar, before she needed to get back to campus. Tell me, what’s this book about?
-You were at Presidency in the late sixties, right?
He’d gotten a contract from an academic press, to write a history of students at the college when the Naxalite movement was at its height. The idea was to compare it to the SDS in America. He was hoping to write it as an oral history. He wanted to interview her.
Interesting, I thought, as I finished the book, that a book about the dangers of those types of movements – as young impressionable students are drawn in and end up involved in criminal activity – would be such a hit here in the US. A few hours later, though, I realized it’s not entirely clear where the book/Lahiri comes down with the Naxalites. Does Lahiri end up making the reader feel sympathy for them? Where is the line of responsibility between the leaders of the movement and the college students who carried out their demands? Gauri, one of the main characters, becomes more and more intriguing as we learn more about her true feelings.
which just has in common with The Lowland the re-examination/re-evaluation of 60’s political movements. Like The Lowland, it doesn’t glorify the participants. Interested to see if this thread will continue and/or will be picked up in any other books or cultural venues.