Unccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

 

With this book, we become conscious that Jhumpa Lahiri is not an immigrant. She is a child of immigrants. In Unaccustomed Earth, she writes with simple grace about the burdens of these children – the weight of their ethnicity, and the weight of their immigrant parents’ dreams and expectations.

In “Only Goodness”, a stroy about a family trying to deal with their son’s alcoholism:

That’s the problem with this country,” her mother said. “Too many freedoms. Too much having fun. When we were young, life wasn’t always aout fun.”

Sudha pitied her mother, pitied her refusal to accomodate such an unpleasant and alien fact, her need to blame Amerca and its laws instead of her son… Her parents had been blind to the things that plagued their children: being teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted Wonderbread green. What could there possibly be to be unhappy about? her parents would have thought. “Depression” was a foeign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as ifthe innoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.

This is a book that will wind up on everyone’s summer reading list. Lahiri’s characters are familiar and endearing, and their stories will tug at your heartstrings.

Lahiri sometimes gets criticized for choosing the same milieu and the same class of Ivy League privileged Bengali families in the US. She responds to criticism about her Bengali-American centered subject matter:

 ‘Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time. It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.

           Jhumpa Lahiri, reading for International Readings at Harbourfront, Toronto.

She read marvellously from “Hell-Heaven”, the 2nd story, and arguably the best one, from this beautiful collection.