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Liked It1 of 1 members found this review helpful “This is a beautiful book. Her writing is incomparable.” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“Namesake was better!! But a must read”
Isha C wrote this review 2 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Each story is different, unique yet there is a unifying theme to all the stories. Lahiri has a special gift of relating difficult immigrant issues in how they affect immigrant parents versus their first generation children. Excellent read. ”
jeffreewyn wrote this review 4 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“I loved this book by the author of Namesake.”
paula s wrote this review 8 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Let me begin by saying I do not like short stories; I avoid them at all costs. A friend bought me this book for my birthday, and I didn't even consider that maybe it was a book of short stories. Since I was reading other things, I kept it on my bookshelf until I was ready to read it. When I realized it was short stories, I was disappointed. But my disappointment soon went away.
Melissa wrote this review 10 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
While I do have an affinity to southeast Asian fiction, I think I would have loved this book if I had never read anything in the genre. Each story is comprised of characters of different ages, genders, relationships, and walks of life, but they all share a common bond and certain "facts of life" characteristics.
Some stories leave you with a sense of what you really want to happen will happen (but short stories are not the thing for closure); others, with disappointment that what you want won't happen at all. In the end, I was deeply satisfied with each story as a whole, and as part of this collection. Wonderful read!”“Much like the Pulitzer-winning debut Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories mostly about upper middle class Bengali immigrants to America. The struggles to adapt while watching their offspring assimilate easily into the new culture seems to be a driving theme in most stories.
rarelythere wrote this review 10 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Interpreter of Maladies immediately threw me back to Arundati Roy's God of Small Things - astonishing level of detail, exploration of the full range of emotions in the immigrant situation, seemingly normal people put through the blender of life - are inspiring to read.
Now, what speaks to me about Lahiri's talent is her ability to become the characters and write without much inhibition. Most people find it easy to write about their own experiences, or spin off some fiction based on their personal experiences. I wonder how Ms.Lahiri manages to write with such clarity about the travails and triumphs of her deceptively simplistic characters.
The relationship dynamics, be it father/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, are probed and presented in sometimes-fascinating, sometimes-shocking ways, somehow managing to present complex emotions in an effortlessly simple way. For instance, early in the first story Ms. Lahiri writes, Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to. It would mean an end to the family she'd created on her own: herself and Adam and Akash, and the second child that would come in January, conceived just before the move.
Iron hand in velvet glove, is what comes to mind when reading her subtle yet striking prose that doesn't resort to melodrama to tug at your heartstrings. The three interconnected stories at the end are powerful, establishing the author as a master of her genre. Despite the single theme in all her stories, each one is unique in showcasing humanity in a gentle and touching way.”
“Beautifully written book. Loved the characters, their stories and their experiences as Indians in America. ”
Jo Ann S wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Lahiri has a real mastery of language. With elegant economy, she is able to build up these convincing, tragic histories which convey all the flux, frustration and tenderness of the second-generation immigrant experience. My favourite story is the one about the alcoholic brother, I forgot the name. And a book-end narrative which is staggering in its sadness”
sharlene t wrote this review 3 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“very good! hugely more gripping than her previous collection of stories”
dolphinaps wrote this review Friday, November 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
1 of 2 members found this review helpful“Lahiri wrote a complete in itself story when writing The Namesake, capturing most common experiences of a migrant community of well educated and middle class white collar people from across the world making a life in a surrounding so very unfamiliar. Now, in this collection of stories long and short she captures fragments of experiences and emotions as incomplete and jagged as shards of a broken mirror, leaving the reader forever dissatisfied and asking - what happened next to this person, that one? - and too, hurt by the various pains of the various characters she leaves no solutions or satisfactory endings for.
Dr. J. G. wrote this review Friday, November 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
It is at once a testament to her quality as a writer that one not only ends up feeling this way about a whole lot of characters and a community that one might or might not be familiar with, but even nostalgic to the point of being homesick at heart for the places she mentions, whether one has loved them in fact or not known them at all.
One does not, of course, love every character - that would be inhuman, especially in case of a man who uses a society he does not stem from, and its freedom of people and relationships that is foreign to him, to make use of people pretty much as one uses facilities of a supermarket or a laundromat or so, only to discard them or reuse them as it suits his purpose. One wishes Paul could have done something rather than being stunned by the audacity of the guy in threatening to sue him, having himself perhaps ruined one or more lives that Paul was witness to the process of of. But Paul does stem from the society that offers the freedom and has the values that make it possible to have them, which is, to be civilised in a way the other male is unfamiliar with and perhaps even contemptuous of, and so Paul ends up looking like a loser in a contest with a comparatively primitive male, which almost anyone from a civilised society would when suddenly confronting a beast of prey, even a small one.
And one ends up finally too stunned at the end of the tale of the sensitive son of the beautiful woman leaving no imprint except for his work documenting others, wishing it were not so, wanting to go back in time and shake the daylights out of him for the couple of mistakes he made - hurting the two adoring little girls with his words stemming from his own pain, being unable to seize the opportunity to grasp the woman that was his last chance at love and life and to hold on.
One wishes one could shake him into changing and wiping off those mistakes, make up for having hurt the little girls and be friends with them again since they already adore him and understand him enough to not tell on his tirade, and being able to find happiness - even living in the beautiful house his mother chose, to live with his love, and in fact marry her, so he could have a family, a wife, children - but then, one does wish for much.
Life often denies such beautiful ends. ”
“Jhumpa is a beautiful storyteller”
Lolasaysboo wrote this review Tuesday, November 17 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
