SEPTEMBER 25, 2013

VIDEO:JHUMPALAHIRIATWORK
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/video
-jhumpa-lahiri-at-work.html
Jhumpa Lahiri, who has been publishing stories in The New Yorker since
1998, has a new novel out this week, The Lowland, which tells the story
of two Calcutta-born brothers during an attempted Maoist revolt, in the late
nineteen-sixties. One of them eventually emigrates to the U.S., and part of
the book is about his painful reckoning with the past as he tries to establish a
new life.
During a visit to Lahiris house in Brooklyn (she currently lives full-time in
Rome), we asked how she went about writing the book. She explained that
The Lowland gestated for a decade before she attempted a draft. You
know, theres this romantic notion that one sits down at ones desk, and picks
up a pen or opens the computer, and within a few months the novel is done.
For Lahiri, its always been a series of fits and starts. Recalling an
interview with Samuel Beckett, who said that his aim was to write without a
style, she talked about her struggle to achieve simplicity. Even when I look
back at my work, I feel frustrated, that it was too fussy. How many words do
you really need to get your message across? I still feel that I have a ways to
go before arriving at something that feels really truly pure.
But Lahiri also spoke about the pleasure of submitting to the forceful pull of
narrative: when she sits down to write, she never knows exactly where the
story will go. Its a very mysterious process.

Book Review: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/ktarticledisplay1.asp?
section=diversions&xfile=/data/diversions/2013/November/diversions_November6.xml
Sujeet Rajan / 8 November 2013

Jhumpa Lahiris sumptuous writing in The Lowland about the trials o

cultural divide prevails over what is an otherwise simple, boxed plot

A consummate player of a yo-yo knows a trick termed a sleeper, where the unspooled
sedentary in posture as it spins on its axle, before returning to the hand that threw it.
tricks include the device rolling on the floor without collapsing, returning to the hand
intact, before being hurled again for another routine. In her latest offering The Lowla
wields the reins of the story with the authority of a champion yo-yo player.

The novel is her fourth book all of them weaved around the theme of dislocation of
cultivating the angst of those pining for the ones who left; the late knowledge in life fo

that there are no places to hide in this world, especially from ones own guilty self. Cu
both hyper-local and disingenuous, a fickle companion to build a foundation upon wh
matters of the sub-conscious and the soul, helplessly drawn to shores far away when a
beckons from close by. She effortlessly creates conflict in comfort, comfort in conflict

In The Lowland, Lahiri also seems to have unfinished business left from the Bengal o
from which her previous, debut novel The Namesake also emanated from. Both are fa
feature a couple catapulted to America from Kolkata, to live a life which at least one o
did not plan for emotionally or psychologically, then delivers a baby.

Elements of discord and alienation, hope and rejection, love and loss between spouse
themes that were nurtured in The Namesake, as well as her past two short story collec
Maladies and the Unaccustomed Earth.

The Lowland, steeped in the violent and outlawed Naxalite movement of the 60s, revo
of brothers Subhash and Udayan, in Kolkata, and the enigmatic Gauri, the woman de
wife of both of them. First, to the charismatic revolutionary younger brother Udayan,
then when pregnant with his child, marries the sedate and moderate scholar Subhash
lives in Rhode Island, after Udayan is shot by the police. His death, though, remains a
like a jack-in-the-box that threatens to startle the reader at any turn of the page throu

Subhash convinces Gauri to marry him for the sake of the unborn child, even though
Gauri sees it as an escape from the place where everybody, except her brother, has rej
alliance with Udayan and his incendiary politics.

In America, Gauri caves in to her first love the study of philosophy. She starts to fo
more time on taking classes at the local university, even as Subhash bec-omes the role
father to Udayan and Gauris daughter Bela. His greatest fear is the child coming to k
real father, even as his marriage to Gauri starts to crumble. Bringing matters to a hea
ageing parents in Kolkata, whom he finds increasingly hard to ignore, and yearns to t

Lahiri superbly juxtaposes the tug-of-war between Subhashs comfortable life on the
versus the debilitating life of his parents on the East Coast in India, where his intrinsi
on, and he cannot tear away from.

Like a patch of land at the back of his house in Kolkata, which becomes submerged du
a lowland and emerges again when the rains abate, showing also two distinct pon
separated by an emb-ankment, the two cultures he wears and breathes, often become
at the same time.

After the death of Subhashs father, his mother, who is going senile, starts to clean the

ponds with her bare hands the rotten waste she surfaces symbolic of her and her hu
ambitions and hopes of living in a joint family with their sons and families, the moder
plastic refuse uncovered, of the negligence by her sons.

Spanning over six decades, the constant flashbacks and non-sequential narrative u
to great effect in The God of Small Things gives The Lowland a rhythm similar to a
incisive, detailed prose of small and big tragedies, in the intense minimalist style of R
which lands like snowflakes without leaving traces of water, builds in momentum onl
the novel.
Life unspools like a trusted yo-yo from her practised hand.
Despite the great writing of Lahiri, The Lowland has, however, its flaws that define it
after the book is done.

The research-heavy early chapters, on the Naxalbari movement, and then the ultimat
is a novel which defied conventional wisdom to let it gain life in itself as it rolled on
scripted to perfection is an aberration too. The plot is simple, boxed in, conclusive;
lives of most of the characters chalked with studied finality seem to have halos of gho
characters from Lahiris past books.

The act of rebellion by Gauri for self-identity and the way she charts her independent
stands out. Her unjustifiable character and the shades shes given, is perhaps a way o
the tide of a routine in a story that had otherwise the makings of a repetitive throw of

There is also a nagging feeling that the theme she espoused in her short story The Thi
Continent in Interpreter of Maladies would resonate in The Lowland too, like it did in
it does. The empathy, love and goodness that Lahiri generously heaps on some charac
infallible to wickedness, permeates Subhash too, like it did Ashoke in The Namesake,
The Third and Final Continent.

Yet, this goodness that Lahiri imbues her characters with time and again, combined w
marvellous writing, prevails and makes her latest book memorable.
CLICKHERETODOWNLOADEBOOKTheLowlandbyJhumpa
LahiriShortlistedforthe2013ManBookerPrize
FromthePulitzerPrizewinning,bestsellingauthorofTheNamesake
comesanextraordinarynewnovel,setinbothIndiaandAmerica,that
expandsthescopeandrangeofoneofourmostdazzlingstorytellers:atale
oftwobrothersboundbytragedy,afiercelybrilliantwomanhauntedbyher

past,acountrytornbyrevolution,andalovethatlastslongpastdeath.
Bornjustfifteenmonthsapart,SubhashandUdayanMitraareinseparable
brothers,oneoftenmistakenfortheotherintheCalcuttaneighborhood
wheretheygrowup.Buttheyarealsoopposites,withgravelydifferent
futuresahead.Itisthe1960s,andUdayancharismaticandimpulsive
findshimselfdrawntotheNaxalitemovement,arebellionwagedto
eradicateinequityandpoverty;hewillgiveeverything,riskall,forwhathe
believes.Subhash,thedutifulson,doesnotsharehisbrotherspolitical
passion;heleaveshometopursuealifeofscientificresearchinaquiet,
coastalcornerofAmerica.
ButwhenSubhashlearnswhathappenedtohisbrotherinthelowland
outsidetheirfamilyshome,hegoesbacktoIndia,hopingtopickupthe
piecesofashatteredfamily,andtohealthewoundsUdayanleftbehind
includingthosesearedintheheartofhisbrotherswife.
Masterlysuspenseful,sweeping,piercinglyintimate,TheLowlandisawork
ofgreatbeautyandcomplexemotion;anengrossingfamilysagaandastory
steepedinhistorythatspansgenerationsandgeographieswithseamless
authenticity.ItisJhumpaLahiriattheheightofherconsiderablepowers.
A Brother, Long Gone, Is Painfully Present
Jhumpa Lahiris New Novel, The Lowland
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 19, 2013
Jhumpa Lahiri first made her name with quiet, meticulously observed
stories about Indian immigrants trying to adjust to new lives in the
United States, stories that had the hushed intimacy of chamber
music. The premise of her new novel, The Lowland, in contrast, is
startlingly operatic. Udayan, an idealistic student in Calcutta in the
1960s, is drawn into Mao-inspired revolutionary politics. After his
violent death (which happens fairly early in the novel), his devoted,
dutiful brother, Subhash, marries his pregnant widow, Gauri, and
brings her to America in hopes of giving her a new start in a new
country. Their marriage, though, will remain haunted by their
memories of Udayan and a terrible secret Gauri keeps to herself.
The Lowland is certainly Ms. Lahiris most ambitious undertaking

yet, and it eventually opens out into a moving family story. It is

initially hobbled, however, by pages and pages of historical
exposition, by a schematic plotline and by a disjunction between the
authors scrupulous, lapidary prose and the dramatic, Dickensian
events she recounts. It is only in the second half that Ms. Lahiris
talent for capturing the small emotional details of her characters
daily lives takes over, immersing us in their stories and making us
less aware of the books creaky and often noisy hydraulics.
In her 2003 novel, The Namesake, as in her two collections of short
stories (Unaccustomed Earth and the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Interpreter of Maladies), the lives of Ms. Lahiris characters were
made palpably real to us, through her exacting evocation of their dayto-day routines: the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with
curry, that a Bengali mother makes for her embarrassed daughter to
take to school, the careful adoption of American rituals like making
snowmen or dyeing Easter eggs. Such particulars accentuated the
differences between immigrant parents and their American-born
children, and the almost existential sense of dislocation that exile can
produce in people who feel at home neither in their ancestral country
nor in the United States.
While the reader came to know these earlier people as distinct
individuals, the characters in The Lowland seem to have been
conceived as representative types with designated roles to play in a
family melodrama constructed to underscore generational patterns of
resentment and redemption, rootedness and freedom. Udayan is the
rebellious, impulsive brother, who makes a series of reckless
decisions that will affect everyone who loves him for decades to come.
Subhash is the nice, rational brother, who will spend much of his life
dealing with the fallout from his siblings heedless actions. Gauri is an
angry, selfish woman, who will repay Subhashs generosity and
kindness and his efforts to invent a new life for them in Rhode
Island with chilly disregard.
Subhashs mother had tried to dissuade him from marrying Gauri,
telling him that shes Udayans wife, shell never love you. She also
warned him that Gauri was too withdrawn, too aloof to be a mother.
Though this prophecy has been delivered by a woman embittered by

the death of her favorite son, it will turn out to be all too true: Gauri
will abandon her daughter, Bela conceived with Udayan and
brought up by Subhash as his own beloved child to pursue her own
dreams of studying philosophy and building an academic career. Ms.
Lahiri never manages to make this terrible act handled by Gauri
with cruelty and arbitrary highhandedness plausible,
understandable or viscerally felt. Why would Gauri regard
motherhood and career as an either/or choice? Why make no effort to
stay in touch with Bela or explain her decision to move to California?
Why not discuss her need to leave her marriage and her child with her
husband?
Because Ms. Lahiri never gives us real insight into Gauris decisionmaking or psychology, she comes across not as a flawed and
complicated person, but as a folk tale parody of a cold, selfish witch,
whos fulfilling her nasty mother-in-laws worst predictions. The
reader often has the sense that Ms. Lahiri is trying to fit her
characters into a predetermined narrative design, which can make for
diagrammatic and unsatisfying storytelling.
What turns this novel around and ultimately seizes the readers
imagination is Ms. Lahiris deeply felt depiction of Subhashs
relationship with Bela: his unwavering devotion to this good-hearted
little girl; his bafflement as her grief over her mothers abandonment
leads her to withdraw from him as well; his slow, painful efforts to
rebuild a life for himself in the wake of Gauris departure.
It is in these later chapters that the cumbersome historical exposition
and overarching narrative architecture fall away, and Ms. Lahiris
most shining gifts as a writer come to the fore: her ability to conjure
the daily texture of peoples lives, her understanding of how their
personal and cultural expectations have shaped their choices, her
talent for mapping moods and inchoate emotions with pointillist
precision.
As this happens, the characters in The Lowland with the qualified
exception of Gauri become fully human: driven not by one
identifiable trait (like duty, anger or rebellion) but by a full spectrum
of feelings, and capable not only of rage and vexation but also of
forgiveness and hope. By its end, this ungainly novel reminds us of

Ms. Lahiris copious talents as a writer, however imperfectly they are

employed here.
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A version of this review appears in print on September 20, 2013, on
page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: A Brother, Long
Gone, Is Painfully Present.