Roopsi's review

I loved your review as much as I hated Interpreter of Maladies (which is a lot of hate, by the way). I totally agree with you about her over-generalisation (I am a desi myself, no immigrant, but I am sure not all Bengalis would travel a hundred miles everyday to buy fish). I remember little else of the book, anyways. People told me she has matured as a writer, and unaccustomed earth is worth reading. I was skeptical. Now, after reading your review, I am convinced that reading Unaccustomed Earth is, plain and simple, a waste of time. I might still go ahead and read it, one of these days.

What a spot-on review! Your experiences resonate with me SO well - especially the story about "feeling comfortable" with the material because of your brownness (like that means you automatically are down with any brown authors, ha!) White people are funny this way...

I read Lahiri just because there has been a personal connection to her work for me ever since Interpreter and her books are a fast read for being "literature" - most of the time you can skip the parts she has repeated from previous stories but with different names for her characters. But this book almost did me in for good. Does she write out the formula before she starts her stories or what? I remember throwing The Namesake across the room with great force a few years ago when I got close to the end. What an infuriating book. But somehow it gave non-Indians the impression that they were getting a glimpse into Indianness... or something.

Anyway I am getting near to the end on this collection and your review cracked me up. Well done!! It's good to know I'm not the only one who thought this was rather underwhelming.

I, as a half-black, half-white United States citizen, read this book through completly different eyes. I could see how her generalization could be difficult to bear when what she is generalizing is your racial and national identity. Yet what would you have in its place? It seems that that IS the experience that Lahiri had: she immigrated (as a child granted) to the Northeastern US, her parents were well-educated, she oftened visited Calcutta and she married a non-Bengali. This is clearly NOT the experience of every Bengali immigrant, as you can attest to, yet it surely is a common enough one for her to become the most famous Bengali writer in the West (or maybe the world). And her writing is craftsman-like in its precision, smooth and effecient. Her stories, while written in a simplistic style, usually tackle pretty large issues and do so in effectively laconic language. But really I am commenting because I want to know what writer does convey a more realistic portrait of the Bengali immigrant experience in the 21st century? And also Their Eyes Were Watching God was every bit as frustrating for me to stomach as this book was for you. It seemed to drive home so many stereotypes about Blacks that to me, as a well-read college educated African-American, I just didn't think were true. But that's the thing about stereotypes, they always originated from some aspect of truth. The problem arises when someone sees you and thinks they know you just because they read IoM. And yet by having read IoM they know more about your culture and society than if they never had. And that's the conclusion I came to about TEWWG: even though I didn't like the book, it was showed most White Americans more about the African-American experience than they would otherwise have ever seen.

Roopsi, gotta say I didn't love your review. I am so tired of Indians taking offense at a "Western" interpretation of their culture, as though there is a "right" way to reflect the various realities in the Indian immigrant experience. there are enough Indian authors read in the States by now that the idea that "now ignorant people everywhere will start to believe that it's okay for Indian children to marry non-Indians" (are you serious?? you think she's the only Indian author to explore that theme??) completely ignores Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Bharati Mukherjee, Pankaj Mishra, VS Naipaul, the list goes on and on. As a Bengali born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and Delhi who then moved to the United States, I find many truths in Lahiri's work, truths that reflect the subtlety in the underlying pain and sense of loss that many immigrants undergo in moving away from their homeland or growing up in a place where their reality is not reflected in the majority voice. By calling her an "Uncle Tom" totally confuses the term Uncle Tom and misuses it. Because Jhumpa Lahiri's words might resonate with an audience beyond just Indians makes her a Clarence Thomas/Uncle Tom? Because she describes DECEPTIVELY simple realities via a vis parents and food and love makes her an Uncle Tom? What on earth are you saying? These are dangerous terms that require serious explanation, you can't just throw them around.

It's not really the generalizations. After all, couldn't everyone pick out certain aspects of his or her own culture, town, educational institution, whatever, and come up with certain tropes? What I didn't like about this collection is how Lahiri is just trading on the same old tired themes while serving up some exotic flavor. How about some new insights or some growth as a writer? Or something other than "I wanted to eat fish sticks, but my parents would only give me chicken curry." It's done to death! Let's look for some new ideas.

By the way, I'm not a Bengali immigrant nor do I think that if there is an "immigrant experience," it isn't necessarily culture-bound--though certain elements are.

For some of my response, I refer you to my comment below. I'm not writing as an Indian taking offense. Lahiri can't control the response of her readers, and I don't really hold her responsible for people's ignorance. She just writes the stories. What people do with it is beyond her.

I am writing, though, as someone who studies literature and got the feeling from the collection that there was some pandering--and, yes, Uncle Tom-ing--going on. As in, "Hi, let me be your native informant. LOOK, Indian food!"

In my review, I did acknowledge that there were moments when the text really resonated with me. But the moments that felt disingenuous ruined them for me.

Also, I think you might have missed the humor in my review.

I really enjoyed your review, and am following this very interesting discussion. As an Orthodox Jew, I am also a member of a minority who is often (almost always, if you ask me) misrepresented in popular literature. My reactions to fiction about Orthodox Jews have ranged from laughing disbelief to anger, and I have rarely felt that my personal experience resonated with that of Orthodox characters in fiction.

There was a very interesting discussion in "The New York Times" and "The Forward" about literature describing Orthodox Jews, and whether or not fiction authors have a responsibility to represent Orthodox Jews accurately, and who was qualified to determine the standard for that accuracy. I think that that discussion has broader relevance to multi-cultural fiction in general. What is individual, and what is cultural? And if a reader reads a novel depicting one individual's experience, and then presumes to understand the culture at large, is that the responsibility of the author or the reader? Do we blame the author for writing in a way that panders to stereotypes and voyeurism? Or do we blame the reader for their hubris in assuming that any given book provides them with "insider" knowledge?

Anyway, thank you for a stimulating (and yes, quite humorous) review, and for sparking an even more stimulating discussion.

Khaya, your questions hit the nail on the head: "Do we blame the author for writing in a way that panders to stereotypes and voyeurism? Or do we blame the reader for their hubris in assuming that any given book provides them with "insider" knowledge?" And I agree with Roopsi, that once the book has been written, it's out of the hands of the author and what people do with it is beyond her.

My point is simply that I am not sure the examples in Roopsi's original review were accurate examples of "Aunt Jhumpa-ing", or Lahiri pandering to white, western, non-Indian audiences. I didn't realize that an Indian getting a phd in cambridge and going to Italy and being in an interracial relationship were the "same old tired themes". What are the same old tired themes for me are arranged marriage, simplistic views on caste and poverty, Indians as biotech gods and Bollywood, to name a few. In Lahiri's book, almost none of those are ever mentioned, and she weaves arranged marriage as though the readers were already aware of what it is (eg the first and second story). And in her book, the children of immigrants are rarely ever the stereotype of the Indian that most Americans think of. She represents them as just as angsty, arty, tortured, indiviualistic as the next American from a similar class background, while all the while undergoing serious trauma from being accepted in their parents' adopted country. I'm not sure if that's pandering, or if in fact for many people it's quite simply very true.
And the Dunkin' Donuts example. Roopsi, you write humorously about your own experience and scoffed at the moment in the book but I think you missed the point in Lahiri's story. When Kaushik took his new stepsisters there Lahiri spoke of a subtle, tender moment when the three of them connected over the fact that they had all lost a parent, and how a familial bond was forming over that very fact, their Indianness being almost secondary to that. The location was secondary, though perhaps laid bare in an ironic contrasted, weirdly funny way the new reality of those two girls.
In my view Lahiri's talents lie primarily in the tone she sets, the sense of loss and constant hyperawareness of duality facing immigrants, often the most trivial seeming differences ringing the loudest. That mood is present throughout, even when she's mentioning things like food, music, simple utterances by a husband to a wife.
And for me she writes keeping a distinctly Bengali experience in mind, something not reflected in pop Indian-American culture that is often dominated by a very north Indian view on things. The food and music and artists (fish with mustard sauce, the old club culture in Calcutta, Tagore, Rai, Hemantha) that are mentioned nostalgically are all Bengali, and not things even many Indians are familiar with. She's capturing a spirit of a very tightly-knit community, though perhaps in some ways
an "imaginary homeland" as Rushdie would call it: foggy memories and losses and putting them into a context of Bengali immgrants in America, ultimately just people going through life in the same way that any one else would, given a cultural context that sets them apart, sometimes painfully and at other times positively. My main issue with her book was the format -- reading one short story after another, one catches on to a style that is uniquely hers and can therefore seem predictable after some time. For that reason I appreciated The Namesake more. Plus the overwhleming sense of grief and melancholy could have been buffeted by lighter, funnier moments, which are also part of immigrant/first generation experience. I don't think Lahiri does humor. But I can live with that.

Stereotypes? voyeurism? Auntie Lahiri?

We must be from different universes. I find Lahiri's writing very beautiful and her universe vibrant and real.

I guess people from India disagree.

This is a beautiful book, and Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Interpreter of Maladies was worth reading several times just for the language and the visual images it evoked.

Sive

Brinda write: "My main issue with her book was the format -- reading one short story after another, one catches on to a style that is uniquely hers and can therefore seem predictable after some time."

This is EXACTLY what I mean with the same old tired......

Understand that her themes are not what's tiring for me. I think short stories that are tied together by any one theme run into a similar problem of repition. I didn't feel that way about the Namesake, because of the continuous story line. In this book, when she starts each story anew, there is a sense of a similar sentiment being revisited. each story on its own, for the most part, were very interesting. read together as a body of work, i found it repetitive. For that reason, liked the Namesake more.

Roopsi: This is EXACTLY what I mean with the same old tired......

So it seems that what you tire of is not the cultural repititions in the book but the fact that she only uses a few different set-ups to explore her characters: It doesn't matter if they were Bengali immigrants or Chinese immigrants. In reading the collection I felt that if you changed the names and the cultural references, these stories could be about any first-generation Americans. It seemed at heart to be about very human things that relate to being uprooted from a traditional land and made to take root in a foriegn one. And these themes did get repititious in UE, but it seemed to be Lahiri's leitmotif (albiet her only one thus far). And while the humor was appreciated the Uncle Tom reference wasn't. There is so much history and pain associated with that reference to invoke it just for the sake of humor. There were many educated blacks who did take the Uncle Tom route in the south and in many ways this was of detriment to the advancement of blacks during the Jim Crow era. They advocated the seperation of blacks from whites and encouraged blacks to be satisfied with their station in life. It seems that Lahiri's repititious themes and Bengali cliches lack the deceptive power to subdue that Uncle Tom writers of the black south (or north for that matter) held. And what of Their Eyes Were Watching God as a stereotypical folk view of Southern blacks? Is this something allowable as it doesn't tread close to your cultural home. Also I really am interested in finding more nuanced Bengali (or Indian) writers. So any recommendations will be welcome. And in one sense you review was correct in that it fostered a great discussion and that is the point anyway.

I really think you are missing the point of this book and the author's work in general. She has never claimed to be an expert on the Bengali immigrant experience, but instead writes from her own experiences to explore issues that transcend culture. I think this latest book of short stories does just that -- exploring issues of family, relationships, the choices that people make in their lives and the consequences. These are all issues that anyone can relate to regardless of their heritage. If you want to know more about the place that Lahiri writes from, you should listen to an interview that she did on KQED's forum (podcast). She, in fact, rejects the idea that she represents all Bengalis and that she is simply trying to capture the human experience in her writing. I also had some preconceived ideas about her after reading The Namesake and seeing the movie. I thought that she was just revisiting the immigrant story, but the interview dispelled those notions and gave me a much greater respect for her and what she is trying to do with her writing.

Please rest assured that some of us stupid white folk are not so narrow-minded to assume that all Bengali's will marry within their culture through an arranged marriage just because we've read Lahiri, and I don't think it's fair of you to blame her for your co-workers' bigotry.

The advice "write what you know" seems to be something that many reviewers here don't know or have forgotten. The complaints here seem odd to me, as I don't think people would have the same negative things to say about Philip Roth, Jane Austen, August Wilson or Gish Jen--authors whose main themes and characters might seem repetitive, but still are engrossing, entertaining writers with a strong voice, viewpoint, and universal themes that speak to everyone--no matter of skin pigment.

While The Namesake is still my favorite of her books (probably because I like more continuity than the short story format allows), I found these stories engrossing and moving--not as someone looking with wonder at a different culture but rather as another member of the human race who has lost a parent, felt regret over wasting time in a horrible relationship, noted the difficulties inherent in connecting to others, and struggled to understand the world around me.