Word: lahiri
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could call Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin; 291 pages) a multigenerational saga of the immigrant experience, but that makes it sound like a tedious prime-time mini-series instead of what it is: a delicate, moving first novel. It begins in Cambridge, Mass., with the birth of a son to the Gangulis, an Indian couple who recently arrived in America. New England seems a chilly dreamworld to them compared with their native Calcutta. "Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged," Lahiri writes, "those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those...
...successful architect, but he is never quite comfortable in his own skin. He feels neither Indian nor American, without even a true home to feel homesick for. But a series of tableaux, however poignant, does not a novel make. In her Pulitzer-prizewinning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri mastered the art of ending on a freeze-frame, leaving her characters suspended in a moment of ambiguity and ambivalence. It doesn't work quite as well at novel length, and The Namesake feels like three-quarters of a book--albeit three-quarters of a splendid one. --By Lev Grossman
...JHUMPA LAHIRI, Pulitzer prizewinning author: "I've reread Franny and Zooey. There is something reassuring about Salinger, and I also wanted to read a novel set in New York City. Though it is a dark story, Salinger's New York family survives their difficulties with humor and grace...
...Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent?...
Indian-American literature has been sparse until recently, but Lahiri's book, her first, should shine a new spotlight on this growing genre. A beautiful, sensitive collection that will please the readers on your shopping list...