About this title: In this collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, eight dazzling stories take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as each explores the secrets at the heart of family life.
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Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307265739ISBN:0307265730
Description: Good. Used item may show library stamps, stickers and marks. Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307265739ISBN:0307265730
Description: Good. Used item may show library stamps, stickers and marks. Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Description: Good. 0307265730 Book could have shelf wear, or a bump, or sunfade to edges. These are new unread books from the publisher with one of these conditions. See are feedback as customers are satisfied in how we grade our books. Has remainder mark. Fast shipping and customer service is our number 1 priority! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780307278258ISBN:0307278255
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 352 p. Vintage Contemporaries (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN-13:9780307265739ISBN:0307265730
Description: Very Good. Very nice hardcover book w/tight & square binding. DJ is VG w/some light edge wear. Text is clean, bright and unmarked. No names, no remainder marks, no stickers. Careful packaging and fast shipping. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780307278258ISBN:0307278255
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 352 p. Vintage Contemporaries (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN-13:9780307265739ISBN:0307265730
Description: New in Acceptable jacket. Bargain Book! Brand new book with damaged dust jacket. Publisher's inventory dot on bottom edge. We ship 6 days a week, generally within 24 hours; single CDs and DVDs upgraded to 1st class! read more
Description: Reader copy. LARGE TYPE. Ex-Public Library. Covers and page edges show heavy wear. Text is clean. Usual library stickers and stamps. Save a tree-buy used.. read more
Description: New. Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas. GREAT BUY. Brand New From US Distributor. WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER with OVER 3, 500, 000 BOOKS SOLD. read more
"Many classical composers were masters in the art of variation on a theme in music. Mozart showed off just how many things you could do with the tune "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Jhumpa Lahiri has applied the same principle to the short story and produced a brilliant work of art.
I am not a particular fan of the short story, but Lahiri has convinced me once again that I could be. Her genius, I believe, is that she doesn't waste her time recreating the wheel. She has her story and it is an experience of Indian immigrants who struggle with their new American identities. It's important to realize that it's not THE Indian immigrant story. Obviously, not all experiences are them same. Surely, they don't all live in the Boston area and go to Harvard. Perhaps some of their mothers weren't as accomplished at making Bengali meals. Perhaps, some of them even had more than one sibling and if they did, they actually liked each other. This, however, isLahir's story and changing those things around doesn't seem to be the kind of variety she is interested in.
Her variety can be found as she alters the protagonist's characterization and conflict. She never abandons her theme of loneliness but with a trill here and some counterpoint there, she manages to create a beautiful, independent story each time. It's when they stand side by side as a whole, the same but different, that her art and talent shines."
"lahiri's writing style is beautiful. while someone once described it as "relentless detail," i like to think of it otherwise. that said, there was something nagging me while reading it that i could neither shake nor put my finger on. then i figured it out. there are two things that bothered me about this book. 1) lahiri seems to be almost obsessed with elite private universities. not a story goes by that doesn't mention harvard, mit, bryn mawr, swarthmore, etc. it's excessive. according to wikipedia, she went to barnard undergrad and got 3 masters (english, creative writing, and comp lit) and a PhD from boston university. clearly someone who is both familiar with and invested in the ivory tower. 2) lahiri also seems to be obsessed with interracial (bengali/white) relationships and leaves no space for intraracial bengali relationships, except for those of the older generations, the immigrants, etc. as if intraracial erotics were a thing of the subcontinent and steeped deeply in patriarchy."
"i think that, as short story collections go, this one is up there with the great masterpieces -- flannery o'connor, hawthorne, raymond carver, nadine gordimer, alice munro (the writers who come to mind are the ones who straightforwardly explore the torments of the human heart). the most extraordinary feeling i have about it is that i glided from story to story without having much of a sense of interruption. the stories flow into each other, having to do with people who are different (in age, gender, lifestyle) but also similar in some deep way, so that you have a sense that you are reading about the same group of folks, people who share a profound connection. the last three stories are interconnected, yet i felt no difference. they all felt interconnected to me.
part of it is that all these characters are locked inside, deeply alone. they are remote from others and also from themselves. i feel it would be extremely hard to have a relationship with them, and i wouldn't want to. yet, they seem so incredibly human, so easy to identify with. this is lahiri's sleight of hand, to make you feel both very close and infinitely distant from these people.
these characters are also intensely self-contained, though not in an assured, relaxed way. they feel to me as if they were tightly wound up, and held themselves together with great care, aware that a sudden movement can make the tightly wound edifice of their lives spring into chaos.
there is of course the theme of immigration, of living in a place that is not yours, and you don't feel as yours. this is always true in the book for the first-generation immigrants, the parents. most of the kids were born here -- hence the tragic, portentous intergenerational strife. all of the children seem married to people with anglo names, some of them clearly identified as white. it's strange how race doesn't seem to be much of a concern for lahiri. apart from one egyptian character, everyone is either bengali or assumed to be a white american. race-based discrimination never comes up. if anything, class is more of a concern. everyone is highly educated and well-off. so, oddly for a book that is so much about cultural and ethnic displacement, this reads to me more like an investigation of a particularly isolated section of the middle/upper middle class than as an investigation of race. in this sense, it is similar to... oh, who writes about the dislocation of the upper middle class in america? i feel i should be able to rattle off authors, yet can think only of movies: the ice storm, ordinary people, six degrees of separation (i guess they need to have donald sutherland in them!).
writers love to probe the dissatisfactions and, ultimately, hidden horrors of the orderly middle/upper-middle class life (see michael haneke's funny games, which is supposed to be about voyeurism instead seems to me to be about class). this is what lahiri does here. is she suggesting that behind wealthy living lies some sort of cultural displacement, that being an immigrant is just one way to be out of place and out of touch?
***
some more stray comments. this is not a cheerful book. it is, in fact, deeply sad. in one way or another, everyone is unhappy, and unhappiness is offered to you matter-of-fact, the way life is. there is no search for happiness, no pursuit of the american dream. at most, these characters seek tranquility and a quiet contentment. right now, actually, i can think only of the father of the first story... another father later on...
like their parents and their arranged marriages, the second-generation children land in their lives rather than choosing them. there is a story in which a young man "chooses" his life and it is a quiet train wreck. even their jobs and their ph.ds seem to have been handed to them, rather than resulting from passion or aspiration or desire. this is not to say that they are not satisfied with their lives. rather, it's as if happiness, this all-american pursuit, were irrelevant, a foreign concept that doesn't apply.
this book relentless focus is relationships, but they are portrayed as if each member lived in profound insularity. the story's protagonists, whose point of view we adopt, see others as if from inside a fish tank. a lot of time is spent being away from others rather than being with them. love, this other american obsession, is unstated and taken for granted, even when it's not there. same with the loss of love, and, ultimately, even death.
one might be tempted to say that lahiri critiques our american obsession with the pursuit of intimacy -- gently mocks this country that, perhaps more than any other, has so much trouble with intimacy that it needs to keep circling around it, fantasizing about it, obsessing about it. but i don't think lahiri is after critiquing anything. i think she describes life as she sees it, the quiet grinding of it, with a sort of melancholy acceptance that appeals to me tremendously.
one last word about language. this book could not be written in a simpler, plainer language. yet the language is gorgeous and the structure of the stories deep and dreamy and enchanting. the language matches the themes: there is no striving, no pulling, so thrashing. instead, lives are built with simplicity and respect, as if they were handed to the author the same way as they are handed to the characters, already formed, like an arranged marriage."
"I haven't been a huge Jhumpa Lahiri fan in the past-- her stories were going to merit an entire chapter in my imaginary work of cultural criticism "Ethnicity is Not a Plot," but this collection totally won me over. I'm not sure I can put a finger on what was so compelling about it, but things were just working. The last section of linked stories, which could have easily devolved into movie of the week territory was utterly compelling, and I am sort of embarassed to say, made me a little weepy. (Though as a disclaimer, other things that have made me weepy this week include: kiling a spider and feeling guilty about it, that visa commercial about the injured olympic track star, and the VH1 100 best songs of the nineties countdown.)"
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