Title: Unaccustomed Earth
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Eight short stories about second-generation Indian-Americans navigating childhood, adolescence and young adulthood in the United States.
I'll admit it, I have some kind of inborn prejudice against short stories. Even though smartmama keeps trying to convince me to take on her favorite genre, every time I pick up a book of short stories, I get frustrated and end up putting it down before I finish. Not this time. Lahiri's stories felt like my own. Her characters struggles with being bored as a stay-at-home mom, relationships with adult children and their parents, going through adolescence when you feel separate from the dominant culture-- all of them could have been written about me. As I read the stories, I kept thinking of that famous opening line from Anna Karenina, which says something to the effect of "Happy families are all happy in the same way, but unhappy families are unhappy in different ways." Tolstoy makes happy families sound boring. The families in Lahiri's book while not perfect, are, for the most part, happy, but they're definitely not boring. I just got finished ordering her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, from amazon. I can't wait to get my hot little hands on it.
2 comments:
lets hear it for jhumpa! i will have read this int of maladies is so good- i really think she is a master of the short story- even better than her novels- I love how she succintly samples ideas, concepts in each story-
You could also try Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder and Other Stories. Each is a short story but they are all related to each other.
Once things die down around here, I'll add the Jhumpa book to my library loan list.
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