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Magazine
Roots, migration and exile
MUKUND PADMANABHAN
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Jhumpa Lahiri on her new book, her voice as a writer and her continuing interest in issues of identity and immigration.
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“I think she was faithful to the book but also took certain liberties that she was inspired to take. I was curious to see how she would interpret it. I wasn’t concerned about a film representation of my book.” On Mira Nair’s adaptation of The Namesake
PHOTO: ELENA SEIBERT
Dealing with the diaspora: Jhumpa Lahiri revisits the familiar in her latest work.
The recent literature of emigration and exile is forged by perspectives that emerge from at least two cultures, identities and, in some cases, languages. The themes in migrant literature, however, vary, depending not only on the country of origin but
also on the pattern of the migration itself. The attention of first generation migrant literature is often directed at the act of migration, the passage to another land, the reception in the emigration country, issues of rootlessness and racism, nostalgia and longing. While some of these issues do crop up in second generation migrant writing, it does so often in a much more morally complex way. Affiliations are more ambivalent, there is a recognition that global uprootedness is…well…a global phenomenon, and the focus, in an odd way, is not on the country of origin or arrival, but in a community that does not fully belong to either.
Jhumpa Lahiri has expressed this sense of feeling in exile more than once. Her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, earned her critical notice as well as popular acclaim, not to speak of a string of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. Having followed this up with a novel (The Namesake), a story about the trials of a young couple that moves from Kolkata to Massachusetts, Lahiri returns to the short story format in Unaccustomed Earth. Scheduled for release on April 1, the eight stories in the book revisit the themes of identity and acculturisation and grapple with the challenges of immigration and exile.
Excerpts from an exclusive telephone interview with the author:
The longest story in your first book, Interpreter of Maladies, is shorter than the smallest one in Unaccustomed Earth. Did you intentionally set out to write longer and more complex short stories in this book?
I grew aware of this as I was writing the stories. I don’t think I set out to do it. I was just trying to work in a longer story mode, not worrying so much about all of the things one learns as a short story writer. About trying to keep things tight and to the point. And not even really worrying even about things such as ‘Would someone publish this because it is too long?’, which is a concern for many short story writers.
I didn’t want to think about these things. I wanted to write longer, looser stories, in the way that many writers I love write them like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Chekov… I was trying to stretch myself a little bit that way. And that I had written a novel in between (The Namesake) came into play as well…I tried to put some of those elements into the stories, I think.
Unaccustomed Earth follows a pattern set by your two earlier books. It deals with the diaspora, questions of identity and acculturisation, with longing and loss. Almost all the characters are Bengali as well. As subject material, this is a rich lode. But have you considered tapping a totally different source?
No.
Why not?
I won’t say I am not interested in writing about anything else, but I continue to remain interested in writing about this world. And I think as long as I remain interested and inspired to write about this world, I should keep doing it. To me the essential element in writing is to truly care and to be interested in what you are writing about.
If one day, I grow tired or bored of this world and these issues, I will probably move on to something else. But I feel there are many many stories to tell.
I don’t think of this as a confinement in any way. I just approach the stories I write as stories about basic life experiences. And they are applicable only to a certain community, or immigrants, or Bengalis, or what have you. I never think of this as something that is limiting me.
Are you suggesting that your writing needs to relate to yourself? Your experiences as a second generation immigrant?
I bring that understanding to the characters, sure. But I don’t think that is very strange in the world of writing. Yes, some writers write completely outside of their own experiences. Others write more on the margins of their own experiences. I am the second kind of writer, but that doesn’t make me unusual.
It isn’t just the subject matter in Unaccustomed Earth, the voice is very familiar too. Elegant, bittersweet, understated…you have heard this said of your fiction before.
To be honest with you, I am not very conscious of voice. It’s a very abstract word for me. I’m just trying to write the stories in the best, most effective way that I can. I want to be clear, get it down, have it understood. I suppose someone could discern a certain distinctive voice in everything I’ve written. Because I am writing the stories and not reading them, I am not aware of this in the same way.
Do you really agree with the epigraph by Nathaniel Hawthorne at the beginning of your book, which says that human nature will not flourish if planted for too long in the same place? And which implies that in order to flourish, it must strike root in unaccustomed earth?
I chose it because it so beautifully expresses so much of what I write about. I also chose it because one of the stories is about gardening (laughs). The epigraph does allow me, my family, the hundreds of people we knew not only to embrace whatever upheavals that happened and later formed our lives, but to see ourselves as part of a long line. Which America is after all…a long line of people uprooting themselves and replanting themselves in unaccustomed earth. And yet with each successive generation, that experience feels so new and alienating…so disconnected.
I was struck by that passage when re-reading The Scarlet Letter. It is not something to agree or disagree with — that is not the point. It just happens to represent a body of experience, the body of experience of the characters in the book.
The last three stories on Hema and Kaushik intersect. Did you begin this as a novel?
No, I did not ever think of it as a novel. I had been thinking about the first story for ten years, it predates the writing of The Namesake. I had an idea in my mind about two families that find themselves in very close quarters for a certain period of time. And I was interested in writing about an immigrant family that goes back to India. It happens from time to time. Sometimes it is for good. Sometimes it is for five years or so and then they come back again. This interested me because it is an exception and I wondered what motivated those kinds of moves.
You wrote an essay praising R. K. Narayan and Maupassant for their “purity of voice, the realism and constraint”. Also for creating portraits of every day life that are “unyielding and unpitying.” Is this how you see your fictional project?
I don’t analyse my writing that way. I just try to stay inside of the stories. It’s hard for me to step outside and look appraisingly at my work. But I will say that I admire that type of writing, Yes, I admire writing about everyday life, but this is not something I consciously set out to do.
Two books of short stories and one novel. Which genre are you more comfortable with?
For the time being, both. I don’t really distinguish between the two as a writer, because I don’t do that as a reader. I understand they are different in the sense one is shorter, but there has never been a big divide for me between one and the other. They are all stories, they have beginnings, middles and ends.
I am working on a novel right now, but I will always love (short) stories and have story ideas at the back of my head. Time will tell if I do prefer one over the other.
Do you want to say something about the new novel now?
Not now. It’s just beginning.
But we can assume it is about Indians and the diaspora?
Yes. You can assume that (laughs).
What did you think of Mira Nair’s film version of The Namesake?
I thought it was lovely, powerful…I thought it was very much her own Namesake, which I wanted it to be. I wanted her to make something of the book that she felt connected to. She put her own spin on it…
Are you suggesting that while it was a good film, it failed to capture the essence of the book and the characters?
I think it did. I think she was faithful to the book but also took certain liberties that she was inspired to take. I was curious to see how she would interpret it. I wasn’t concerned about a film representation of my book. That can only lead to frustration on both sides.
Books and films are fundamentally different experiences. Being a film rendered certain aspects of the book very powerfully. The visual medium can drive a point home in a way that a book can’t.
Portraits of everyday life
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book of short stories covers familiar ground, interpreting the challenge of cultural uncertainties in that quiet and meditative way that marked her stunning first book, Interpreter Of Maladies.
In a gentle manner, Lahiri upsets stereotypes and controverts assumptions by creating situations that, although not unusual, allow her to pick at fundamental dilemmas and ethical predicaments in a manner that endows the stories with a universal appeal. In “Year’s End”, it is a young man who is forced to confront his father’s decision to marry again. In “Hell-Heaven”, a conservative housewife who nurses a secret passion for a family friend, reveals this to her daughter many years later. And in the title story, a young woman based in Seattle, obsesses about the thought of having to look after her aging father, only to be surprised by his self-containment and the discovery he is seeing another woman.
Complex stories
As in Interpreter of Maladies, much of this book is situated in the United States, flitting to India now and then. The exception lies at the end of the book in a trilogy of inter-connected stories (Hema and Kaushik) where the geography expands to include Italy and Thailand and where the structure of the stories expands to take the intriguing half-form of a novella.
The stories in Unaccustomed Earth are longer and considerably more complex than in Interpreter of Maladies. They allow Lahiri the space to digress, to dwell even more closely on the everyday life and experiences, and to probe the cultural ambiguities that lie between encounter and assimilation. On the other hand, their length inevitably takes something away — there are times, the stories meander and you miss the hard-headed purposefulness of the shorter format and its self-imposed structures that often demand tight limited plots, turning-points and resolutions.
In terms subject matter or voice, Unaccustomed Earth does not break or purport to break new ground . But it is another important book from a fine young writer who, in the fashion of a miniaturist, paints portraits of everyday life with exquisite detail and has a rare ability to see profound significance in the smallest of things.
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