Unaccustomed Earth

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Overview

From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth ...

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More About This Book

Overview

From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.

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Editorial Reviews

Michiko Kakutani
As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel The Namesake, Ms. Lahiri writes about these people in Unaccustomed Earth with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision: the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates with his dead wife; the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for her embarrassed daughter to take to school. A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri's appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.
—The New York Times
Liesl Schillinger
…the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself—accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs—is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri's sensitive new collection of stories…Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.
—The New York Times Book Review
Lily Tuck
The eight stories in this collection revolve less around the dislocation Lahiri's earlier Bengali characters encountered in America and more around the assimilation experienced by their children—children who, while conscious of and self-conscious about their parents' old-world habits, vigorously reject them in favor of American lifestyles and partners. Lahiri, who was raised and educated in the United States and whose parents are Bengali, is adept at showing us these cultural and generational conflicts. The stories she generates from these clashes appear true to life, and while a few lack nuance and at times feel familiar, they are never predictable. Lahiri is far too accomplished and empathic a writer to relax her gaze; she excels at uncovering character and choosing detail.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly

The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children-and that separates the children from India-remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladiesand The Namesake. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning. In the title story, Brooklyn-to-Seattle transplant Ruma frets about a presumed obligation to bring her widower father into her home, a stressful decision taken out of her hands by his unexpected independence. The alcoholism of Rahul is described by his elder sister, Sudha; her disappointment and bewilderment pack a particularly powerful punch. And in the loosely linked trio of stories closing the collection, the lives of Hema and Kaushik intersect over the years, first in 1974 when she is six and he is nine; then a few years later when, at 13, she swoons at the now-handsome 16-year-old teen's reappearance; and again in Italy, when she is a 37-year-old academic about to enter an arranged marriage, and he is a 40-year-old photojournalist. An inchoate grief for mothers lost at different stages of life enters many tales and, as the book progresses, takes on enormous resonance. Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals. (Apr.)

Copyright 2007Reed Business Information
Library Journal

Four years after the release of her best-selling novel, The Namesake , the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lahiri returns with her highly anticipated second collection of short stories exploring the inevitable tension brought on by family life. The title story, for example, takes on a young mother nervously hosting her widowed father, who is visiting between trips he takes with a lover he has kept secret from his family. What could have easily been a melodramatic soap opera is instead a meticulously crafted piece that accurately depicts the intricacies of the father-daughter relationship. In a departure from her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies , Lahiri divides this book into two parts, devoting the second half of the book to "Hema and Kaushik," three stories that together tell the story of a young man and woman who meet as children and, by chance, reunite years later halfway around the world. The author's ability to flesh out completely even minor characters in every story, and especially in this trio of stories, is what will keep readers invested in the work until its heartbreaking conclusion. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/07.]-Sybil Kollappallil, Library Journal

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal

All eight of the longish stories in Lahiri's third book deal with various male/female relationships-father/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, roommates, step-family, childhood friends-in the context of the immigrant experience. Specifically, Lahiri examines the gulf between first- and second-generation Bengali immigrants-the expectations, often unmet, about, for instance, dress, achievement, and marriage. Lahiri's strengths are her characterizations and knack for universalizing the particular. The last three stories feature characters who meet as children, when Hema's parents share their house with Kaushik's family. Kaushik finds himself sharing more than just his house when, after his mother's death (a recurring theme), his father remarries a woman with two younger daughters. Sarita Choudhury and Ajay Naidu alternate reading the female and male voices, with accents waxing and waning as the story demands. Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 collection The Namesake. Unaccustomed Earth earned a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and debuted at the top of the best sellers list, making it a no-brainer for all library collections.
—John Hiett

Kirkus Reviews
Lahiri (The Namesake, 2003, etc.) extends her mastery of the short-story format in a collection that has a novel's thematic cohesion, narrative momentum and depth of character. The London-born, American-raised author of Indian descent returns with some of her most compelling fiction to date. Each of these eight stories, most on the longish side, a few previously published in magazines, concerns the assimilation of Bengali characters into American society. The parents feel a tension between the culture they've left behind (though to which they frequently return) and the adopted homeland where they always feel at least a little foreign. Their offspring, who are generally the protagonists of these stories, are typically more Americanized, adopting a value system that would scandalize their parents, who are usually oblivious to the college lives their sons and daughters lead. Ambition and accomplishment are givens in these families, where it's understood that nothing less than attending a top-flight school and entering an honored profession (medicine, law, academics) will satisfy. The stunning title story presents something of a role reversal, as a Bengali daughter and her American husband must come to terms with the secrets harbored by her father. The story expresses as much about love, loss and the family ties that stretch across continents and generations through what it doesn't say, and through what is left unaddressed by the characters. Even "Only Goodness," the most heavy-handed piece in the collection, which concerns a character's guilt over her brother's alcoholism, sustains the reader's interest until the last page. The final three stories trace the lives of two characters, Hema andKaushik, from their teen years through their 30s, when fate (or chance) reunites them. An eye for detail, ear for dialogue and command of family dynamics distinguish this uncommonly rich collection. Agent: Eric Simonoff/Janklow & Nesbit
The Barnes & Noble Review
Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer who knows her strengths. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, her novel The Namesake, and this collection, Unaccustomed Earth, she has taken what would seem a narrow slice of the immigrant narrative and sent it sprawling. The characters that populate Lahiri's fiction tend to be of a type; more often than not, they are second-generation Indian immigrants, the children of middle-class Bengalis striving to remake themselves as middle-class Americans. Unaccustomed Earth is, in this sense, not a departure. Its eight stories find Lahiri retreading this familiar ground yet also staking out new territory -- the difficult landscape of American adulthood.

Lahiri's particular brand of prose, at once rich in detail and strikingly economical, plays best to the formal requirements of the short story. The Namesake, while impressive for a first novel, has a meandering quality, as if its author were unsure of how to maintain the momentum of her characters' lives over a full spread of pages. Her stories, by contrast, are commanding; Lahiri knows how to exploit the seemingly infinite resonance of a well-chosen image carefully placed. In the story "Hell-Heaven," the crushing collapse of a platonic romance happens, as it were, offstage. The narrator, a young Bengali girl who watches her mother fall in love with a family friend, remarks the following when he asks her parents for their approval of his chosen bride, a white woman: "My mother nodded her assent, but the following day I saw the teacup Pranab Kaku had used all this time as an ashtray in the kitchen garbage can, in pieces, and three Band-Aids taped to my mother's hand." This teacup, which had earlier signaled Pranab Kaku's assimilation into the family, comes back to quietly mark its fracturing.

"Hell-Heaven" is just one instance of how Lahiri, with Unaccustomed Earth, has harnessed her talent for the elegiac. Her stories are threaded together by a current of loss -- of lovers, of parents, of home. In particular, the three interlinked stories that finish the collection draw the atmospherics of absence to the fore. Hema and Kaushik, the title characters of this trilogy, move into and out of each other's lives, their presences lingering long after they have parted ways. Lahiri's interest in the elegy is more than a passing mood, and in these three stories she invokes its tradition of direction address quite deliberately. "I had seen you before too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life," Hema opens the story "Once in a Lifetime." That a separation and a beginning are inextricable becomes a reality neither Hema nor Kaushik will ever quite shake. Just as the death of his mother and his father's remarriage launch Kaushik into an itinerant adulthood, so too the end of an affair becomes the hinge that forces Hema to begin anew.

As in the case of the teacup, there are no histrionics. Lahiri's narratives tend to be situational rather than specifically plot driven, the tension more likely to emerge from the wordless spaces between people than from any singular event. The stories of Unaccustomed Earth are, on average, considerably longer than those of Interpreter of Maladies, and Lahiri seems to find her ideal rhythm in the structural liberties of the long short story. She avoids both explicit dramatic pivots and the sagging weight of a full back-story -- the essential details must make their own case. It is when she tries to build her stories from a more conspicuous premise that she falters. "Only Goodness," the collection's single weak link, finds Lahiri falling into the trap of exposition. The very skeleton of the story feels didactic -- the perfect immigrant child reeling in guilt over her younger brother's alcoholism. "I can't fix him. I can't fix what's wrong with this family," Sudha proclaims, the dialogue unable to resist the tropes of teenage melodrama.

More often, in these rare instances that Lahiri allows her stories to explode, they do so with all the force gathered over their restrained build-up. In "Nobody's Business," another standout, a graduate student's brooding fixation with his female roommate, Sang, finally bursts into a physical confrontation with her unfaithful boyfriend: "It was easy for Paul to pin Farouk to the ground, to dig his fingers into his shoulders. Paul squeezed them tightly, through the thick wool of the sweater, feeling the give of the tendons, aware that Farouk was no longer resisting. For a moment, Paul lay on top of him fully, subduing him like a lover," Lahiri writes. This is her genius -- she waits patiently for her stories to run their natural course. Here, all of Paul's longing for Sang, all of his loneliness and sexual desperation, find unlikely release in a violent, almost sensual encounter with her boyfriend.

Like so many of the characters in Unaccustomed Earth, Paul exists in the grips of stasis. Where Lahiri's earlier stories dwelt, more often than not, on men and women starting out in the world, her new work turns its attention to people slightly further along in life, catching them at the moment where their lives -- romantic, professional, emotional -- are beginning to plateau. Most affectingly, the title story finds Ruma, a 30-something woman who has left her job at a law firm to raise her young son, adjusting to life in a new city and mourning the death of her mother: "By allowing her to leave her job, splurging on a beautiful house, agreeing to have a second baby, [her husband] was doing everything in his power to make Ruma happy. But nothing was making her happy; recently, in the course of conversation, he'd pointed that out, too." The story is an artist's rendering of a case study in depression. Similarly Amit, in "A Choice of Accommodations," has somehow found himself carrying out the unremitting patterns of domesticity alone, raising his two daughters while his wife toils under the medical resident's inhuman schedule.

If this sounds dismal, it isn't. Unaccustomed Earth may dwell in the experiences of paralysis and loss, but Lahiri's prose also lends itself to the rhythms of awakening. Her broken, multi-clausal sentences catch her subjects in the throes of realization. For instance, here is Ruma, blaming her husband for the fact that both his parents are still alive: "It was wrong of her, she knew, and yet an awareness had set in, that she and Adam were separate people leading separate lives." Through Ruma, Lahiri has given voice to the sentiment -- neither positive or negative, simply true -- that cements her collection. Perhaps, in the end, these stories are not sadder, only wiser. --Amelia Atlas

Amelia Atlas's reviews have appeared in the New York Sun, 02138, and the Harvard Book Review.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307278258
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 4/7/2009
  • Series: Vintage Contemporaries Series
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 352
  • Sales rank: 109,672
  • Product dimensions: 5.16 (w) x 8.01 (h) x 0.74 (d)

Meet the Author

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of two previous books. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. Her novel The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Biography

Award-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri has spent most of her life traveling between countries. Born in London and raised in Rhode Island, she visited Calcutta regularly with her family, often for months at a time. Neither a tourist nor a native, her ties to India are as strong as her ties to the U.S. This feeling of free-floating between cultures, plus her experience growing up in an immigrant household, permeates her characters, settings, and themes.

A serious student, Lahiri excelled at school. As a child, she wrote endlessly in notebooks and reported for her school newspaper, but she did not seriously begin writing fiction until after graduation from Barnard College. She went on to receive three Master's degrees and a PhD, all from Boston University, but had no real interest in academics. She managed to get a few stories published and was eventually accepted to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown -- which put her on the road to finding an agent and selling her first book, a collection of short fiction cryptically entitled Interpreter of Maladies.

When Interpreter of Maladies hit the bookshelves in 1999, readers and critics fell in love with Lahiri's luminous prose and fully realized characters. Moving dexterously between first- and third-person narration and unfolding from the perspectives of both men and women, the nine stories in the anthology showcase Lahiri's flexibility as a writer. She navigates the emotional terrain between two cultures, Indian and American, with grace and deftness; and although she sets her tales in both countries, India always resonates in the hearts of her characters, no matter where they live. In 2000, Lahiri received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Fiction -- an honor rarely bestowed on a first-time author.

In 2003, Lahiri published her debut novel. The story of a first-generation Bengali-American boy and his family, The Namesake became an international bestseller. The New York Times named it a Notable Book of the Year; several publications included it in their annual roundups of best reads; and in 2007, Indian-born director Mira Nair turned it into a critically acclaimed feature film.

Jhumpa Lahiri continues to explore both sides of the cultural divide with passion, clarity, and elegance. Writing in her unique voice, she brings into focus the grey areas of life, creating seamlessly crafted plots and three-dimensional characters that draw readers back again and again.

Good To Know

Like the rest of her family, Lahiri has a (private) "pet name" and a (public) "good name." When she started school, her teachers decided that Jhumpa, her pet name, was the easier one to pronounce, and she has been called that in public ever since, something many of her relatives find odd.

A major turning point for Lahiri's writing career came when she was accepted into the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Lahiri is married to journalist Alberto Vourvoulias, a Guatemalan of Greek ancestry. Their son, Octavio, is learning to speak English, Bengali, and Spanish.

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    1. Hometown:
      New York, New York
    1. Date of Birth:
      1967
    2. Place of Birth:
      London, England
    1. Education:
      B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University

Read an Excerpt

Unaccustomed Earth

After her mother’s death, Ruma’s father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he’d never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. They were package tours, traveling in the company of strangers, riding by bus through the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn’t been a plane crash anywhere in the world.

Occasionally a postcard would arrive in Seattle, where Ruma and Adam and their son Akash lived. The postcards showed the facades of churches, stone fountains, crowded piazzas, terra-cotta rooftops mellowed by late afternoon sun. Nearly fifteen years had passed since Ruma’s only European adventure, a month-long EuroRail holiday she’d taken with two girlfriends after college, with money saved up from her salary as a para- legal. She’d slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now. Her father wrote succinct, impersonal accounts of the things he had seen and done: “Yesterday the Uffizi Gallery. Today a walk to the other side of the Arno. A trip to Siena scheduled tomorrow.” Occasionally there was a sentence about the weather. But there was never a sense of her father’s presence in those places. Ruma was reminded of the telegrams her parents used to send to their relatives long ago, after visiting Calcutta and safely arriving back in Pennsylvania.

The postcards were the first pieces of mail Ruma had received from her father. In her thirty-eight years he’d never had any reason to write to her. It was a one-sided correspondence; his trips were brief enough so that there was no time for Ruma to write back, and besides, he was not in a position to receive mail on his end. Her father’s penmanship was small, precise, slightly feminine; her mother’s had been a jumble of capital and lowercase, as though she’d learned to make only one version of each letter. The cards were addressed to Ruma; her father never included Adam’s name, or mentioned Akash. It was only in his closing that he acknowledged any personal connection between them. “Be happy, love Baba,” he signed them, as if the attainment of happiness were as simple as that.

In August her father would be going away again, to Prague. But first he was coming to spend a week with Ruma and see the house she and Adam had bought on the Eastside of Seattle. They’d moved from Brooklyn in the spring, for Adam’s job. It was her father who suggested the visit, calling Ruma as she was making dinner in her new kitchen, surprising her. After her mother’s death it was Ruma who assumed the duty of speaking to her father every evening, asking how his day had gone. The calls were less frequent now, normally once a week on Sunday afternoons. “You’re always welcome here, Baba,” she’d told her father on the phone. “You know you don’t have to ask.” Her mother would not have asked. “We’re coming to see you in July,” she would have informed Ruma, the plane tickets already in hand. There had been a time in her life when such presumptuousness would have angered Ruma. She missed it now.

Adam would be away that week, on another business trip. He worked for a hedge fund and since the move had yet to spend two consecutive weeks at home. Tagging along with him wasn’t an option. He never went anywhere interesting—usually towns in the Northwest or Canada where there was nothing special for her and Akash to do. In a few months, Adam assured her, the trips would diminish. He hated stranding Ruma with Akash so often, he said, especially now that she was pregnant again. He encouraged her to hire a babysitter, even a live-in if that would be helpful. But Ruma knew no one in Seattle, and the prospect of finding someone to care for her child in a strange place seemed more daunting than looking after him on her own. It was just a matter of getting through the summer—in September, Akash would start at a preschool. Besides, Ruma wasn’t working and couldn’t justify paying for something she now had the freedom to do.

In New York, after Akash was born, she’d negotiated a part-time schedule at her law firm, spending Thursdays and Fridays at home in Park Slope, and this had seemed like the perfect balance. The firm had been tolerant at first, but it had not been so easy, dealing with her mother’s death just as an important case was about to go to trial. She had died on the operating table, of heart failure; anesthesia for routine gallstone surgery had triggered anaphylactic shock.

After the two weeks Ruma received for bereavement, she couldn’t face going back. Overseeing her clients’ futures, preparing their wills and refinancing their mortgages, felt ridiculous to her, and all she wanted was to stay home with Akash, not just Thursdays and Fridays but every day. And then, miraculously, Adam’s new job came through, with a salary generous enough for her to give notice. It was the house that was her work now: leafing through the piles of catalogues that came in the mail, marking them with Post-its, ordering sheets covered with dragons for Akash’s room.

“Perfect,” Adam said, when Ruma told him about her father’s visit. “He’ll be able to help you out while I’m gone.” But Ruma disagreed. It was her mother who would have been the helpful one, taking over the kitchen, singing songs to Akash and teaching him Bengali nursery rhymes, throwing loads of laundry into the machine. Ruma had never spent a week alone with her father. When her parents visited her in Brooklyn, after Akash was born, her father claimed an armchair in the living room, quietly combing through the Times, occasionally tucking a finger under the baby’s chin but behaving as if he were waiting for the time to pass.

Her father lived alone now, made his own meals. She could not picture his surroundings when they spoke on the phone. He’d moved into a one-bedroom condominium in a part of Pennsylvania Ruma did not know well. He had pared down his possessions and sold the house where Ruma and her younger brother Romi had spent their childhood, informing them only after he and the buyer went into contract. It hadn’t made a difference to Romi, who’d been living in New Zealand for the past two years, working on the crew of a German documentary filmmaker. Ruma knew that the house, with the rooms her mother had decorated and the bed in which she liked to sit up doing crossword puzzles and the stove on which she’d cooked, was too big for her father now. Still, the news had been shocking, wiping out her mother’s presence just as the surgeon had.

She knew her father did not need taking care of, and yet this very fact caused her to feel guilty; in India, there would have been no question of his not moving in with her. Her father had never mentioned the possibility, and after her mother’s death it hadn’t been feasible; their old apartment was too small. But in Seattle there were rooms to spare, rooms that stood empty and without purpose.

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. She couldn’t imagine tending to her father as her mother had, serving the meals her mother used to prepare. Still, not offering him a place in her home made her feel worse. It was a dilemma Adam didn’t understand. Whenever she brought up the issue, he pointed out the obvious, that she already had a small child to care for, another on the way. He reminded her that her father was in good health for his age, content where he was. But he didn’t object to the idea of her father living with them. His willingness was meant kindly, generously, an example of why she loved Adam, and yet it worried her. Did it not make a difference to him? She knew he was trying to help, but at the same time she sensed that his patience was wearing thin. By allowing her to leave her job, splurging on a beautiful house, agreeing to having a second baby, Adam was doing everything in his power to make Ruma happy. But nothing was making her happy; recently, in the course of conversation, he’d pointed that out, too.

How freeing it was, these days, to travel alone, with only a single suitcase to check. He had never visited the Pacific Northwest, never appreciated the staggering breadth of his adopted land. He had flown across America only once before, the time his wife booked tickets to Calcutta on Royal Thai Airlines, via Los Angeles, rather than traveling east as they normally did. That journey was endless, four seats, he still remembered, among the smokers at the very back of the plane. None of them had the energy to visit any sights in Bangkok during their layover, sleeping instead in the hotel provided by the airline. His wife, who had been most excited to see the Floating Market, slept even through dinner, for he remembered a meal in the hotel with only Romi and Ruma, in a solarium overlooking a garden, tasting the spiciest food he’d ever had in his life as mosquitoes swarmed angrily behind his children’s faces. No matter how they went, those trips to India were always epic, and he still recalled the anxiety they provoked in him, having to pack so much luggage and getting it all to the airport, keeping documents in order and ferrying his family safely so many thousands of miles. But his wife had lived for these journeys, and until both his parents died, a part of him lived for them, too. And so they’d gone in spite of the expense, in spite of the sadness and shame he felt each time he returned to Calcutta, in spite of the fact that the older his children grew, the less they wanted to go.

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Introduction

"Stunning. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the secrets of the human heart."
—USA Today

The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's discussion of Unaccustomed Earth, a dazzling collection of short stories by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri.

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Foreword

1. Discuss the relevance of the epigraph from Hawthorne’s “The Custom House” not just to the title story but also to the collection as a whole. In which stories do the children successfully “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth”? Why do others find themselves unable to establish roots? How do their feelings of restlessness and insecurity stem from growing up in two cultures? What other more universal problems do they experience? In what ways does their lack of attachment to a place or culture reflect a more general trend in society?

2. In “Unaccustomed Earth,” what underlies the tension in the relationship between Ruma and her father as the story opens? What aspects of the family’s history inhibit their ability to communicate with each other? How do their memories of Ruma’s mother and the life she led influence the paths they choose for the next stages in their lives? Do you feel more sympathy for either character’s point of view?

3. In what ways does “Heaven-Hell” echo the themes explored in “Unaccustomed Earth”? How does the way the story unfolds add to its power and its poignancy? What parallels are there between the narrator’s mother’s “crush” on Pranab and her own infatuation with him and Deborah?

4. What is the significance of the title “A Choice of Accommodations”? What does it imply about Amit and Megan’s marriage? Why do you think Lahiri chose to set the story at Amit’s old prep school? Do you think the events of the weekend bring Amit a better sense of who he is, what he wants and needs from Megan, and his role as ahusband and father? Will the weekend change anything for Amit and Megan and their relationship?

5. “Only Goodness” traces the impact of parental expectations on a sister and brother. Why did Sudha and Rahul develop in such different ways? Discuss such factors as the circumstances surrounding their births and earliest years; the obligations Sudha takes on both as the “perfect daughter” and in response to the combination of love, envy, and resentment Rahul’s attitudes and behavior arouse in her; and the siblings’ awareness of and reactions to the “perplexing fact of [their] parents’ marriage” [p. 137]. Compare and contrast the siblings’ choice of partners. What attracts Sudha to Roger, and Rahul to Elena?

6. Why does Paul, the American graduate student in “Nobody’s Business,” find his roommate, Sang, the recipient of frequent marriage proposals, so intriguing? Does Paul really want to help Sang, or does he get involved in her relationship with Farouk for more selfish reasons? Why do you think Lahiri titled this story “Nobody’s Business” – and what does the title mean to you?

7. In “Once in a Lifetime,” Hema addresses Kaushik directly as she recalls the time they spent together as teenagers. How does this twist on the first-person narration change your experience as a reader? Does it establish a greater intimacy between you and the narrator? Does it have an effect on the flow of the narrative? On the way Hema presents her memories? Is it comparable, for example, to reading a private letter or diary? Are the same things true of Kaushik’s narrative in “Year’s End”?

8. In an interview with Bookforum, Lahiri, whose parents immigrated to London and then to the United States, said, “My parents befriended people simply for the fact that they were like them on the surface; they were Bengali, and that made their circle incredibly vast. There is this de facto assumption that they’re going to get along, and often that cultural glue holds them, but there were also these vast differences. My own circle of friends is much more homogenous, because most of my friends went to college – Ivy League or some other fine institution – and vote a certain way.” How is this mirrored by the friendship between the two sets of parents in “Once in a Lifetime,” who are close friends despite the differences in their backgrounds? Why does this attachment deteriorate when the Choudhuri family returns from India? Which of their habits or attitudes do Hema’s parents find particularly reprehensible and why? What is the significance of Kaushik’s breaking his family’s silence and telling Hema about his mother’s illness?

9. How would you describe the tone and style of Kaushik’s account of his father’s remarriage in “Year’s End”? Does his conversation with his father [pp. 253-255] reveal similarities between them? Why does Kaushik say, “I didn’t know which was worse – the idea of my father remarrying for love, or of his actively seeking out a stranger for companionship” [p. 255]? Does the time he spends with his father’s new family offer an alternate, more complex, explanation for his father’s decision?

10. What role do his stepsisters play in Kaushik’s willingness to accept his father’s marriage? Why is he so outraged by their fascination with the pictures of his mother? He later reflects, “in their silence they continued to both protect and punish me” [p.293]. In what ways does their silence and the reasons for it mirror Kaushik’s own behavior, both here and in “Once in a Lifetime”?

11. How do “Once in a Lifetime” and “Year’s End” set the stage for “Going Ashore,” the final story in the trilogy? What traces of their younger selves are visible in both Hema and Kaushik? In what ways do the paths they’ve chosen reflect or oppose the journeys their parents made as immigrants?

12. Why does Hema find the idea of an arranged marriage appealing? How has her affair with Julian affected her ideas about romantic love? What does her description of her relationship with Navin [pp. 296-298] reveal about what she thinks she wants and needs in a relationship? What role do her memories of her parents’ marriage play in her vision of married life?

13. What motivates Kaushik’s decision to become a photojournalist? In what ways does the peripatetic life of a photojournalist suit his idea of himself? In addition to the many moves his family made, what other experiences make him grow up to be an outsider, “away from the private detritus of life” [p. 309]?

14. What does the reunion in Rome reveal about the ties that bind Hema and Kaushik despite their many years of separation? What does it illustrate about their attempts to escape from the past and their parents’ way of life? What do they come to realize about themselves and the plans they have made as the intimacy between them escalates? Why does Lahiri introduce Hema’s voice as the narrator of the final pages?

15. In what ways does “Going Ashore” bring together the themes threaded through the earlier stories? What does the ending demonstrate about realities of trying to find a home in the world?

16. The stories in Unaccustomed Earth offer a moving, highly original perspective on the clash between family and cultural traditions and the search for individual identity. How does the sense of displacement felt by the older, immigrant generation affect their American-born children? What accommodations do the children make to their parents’ way of life? In trying to fit in with their American friends, do they sacrifice their connections to their heritage? In what ways are the challenges they face more complex than those of their parents?

17. Several stories feature marriages between an Indian-American and an American – and in once case, English – spouse. What characteristics do these mixed marriages share? In what ways does becoming parents themselves bring up (or renew) questions about cultural identity? What emotions arise as they contemplate the differences between the families they’re creating and those in which they grew up?

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Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss the relevance of the epigraph from Hawthorne’s “The Custom House” not just to the title story but also to the collection as a whole. In which stories do the children successfully “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth”? Why do others find themselves unable to establish roots? How do their feelings of restlessness and insecurity stem from growing up in two cultures? What other more universal problems do they experience? In what ways does their lack of attachment to a place or culture reflect a more general trend in society?

2. In “Unaccustomed Earth,” what underlies the tension in the relationship between Ruma and her father as the story opens? What aspects of the family’s history inhibit their ability to communicate with each other? How do their memories of Ruma’s mother and the life she led influence the paths they choose for the next stages in their lives? Do you feel more sympathy for either character’s point of view?

3. In what ways does “Heaven-Hell” echo the themes explored in “Unaccustomed Earth”? How does the way the story unfolds add to its power and its poignancy? What parallels are there between the narrator’s mother’s “crush” on Pranab and her own infatuation with him and Deborah?

4. What is the significance of the title “A Choice of Accommodations”? What does it imply about Amit and Megan’s marriage? Why do you think Lahiri chose to set the story at Amit’s old prep school? Do you think the events of the weekend bring Amit a better sense of who he is, what he wants and needs from Megan, and his role as a husband and father? Will the weekend change anything for Amit and Megan and their relationship?

5. “Only Goodness” traces the impact of parental expectations on a sister and brother. Why did Sudha and Rahul develop in such different ways? Discuss such factors as the circumstances surrounding their births and earliest years; the obligations Sudha takes on both as the “perfect daughter” and in response to the combination of love, envy, and resentment Rahul’s attitudes and behavior arouse in her; and the siblings’ awareness of and reactions to the “perplexing fact of [their] parents’ marriage” [p. 137]. Compare and contrast the siblings’ choice of partners. What attracts Sudha to Roger, and Rahul to Elena?

6. Why does Paul, the American graduate student in “Nobody’s Business,” find his roommate, Sang, the recipient of frequent marriage proposals, so intriguing? Does Paul really want to help Sang, or does he get involved in her relationship with Farouk for more selfish reasons? Why do you think Lahiri titled this story “Nobody’s Business”–and what does the title mean to you?

7. In “Once in a Lifetime,” Hema addresses Kaushik directly as she recalls the time they spent together as teenagers. How does this twist on the first-person narration change your experience as a reader? Does it establish a greater intimacy between you and the narrator? Does it have an effect on the flow of the narrative? On the way Hema presents her memories? Is it comparable, for example, to reading a private letter or diary? Are the same things true of Kaushik’s narrative in “Year’s End”?

8. In an interview with Bookforum, Lahiri, whose parents immigrated to London and then to the United States, said, “My parents befriended people simply for the fact that they were like them on the surface; they were Bengali, and that made their circle incredibly vast. There is this de facto assumption that they’re going to get along, and often that cultural glue holds them, but there were also these vast differences. My own circle of friends is much more homogenous, because most of my friends went to college–Ivy League or some other fine institution–and vote a certain way.” How is this mirrored by the friendship between the two sets of parents in “Once in a Lifetime,” who are close friends despite the differences in their backgrounds? Why does this attachment deteriorate when the Choudhuri family returns from India? Which of their habits or attitudes do Hema’s parents find particularly reprehensible and why? What is the significance of Kaushik’s breaking his family’s silence and telling Hema about his mother’s illness?

9. How would you describe the tone and style of Kaushik’s account of his father’s remarriage in “Year’s End”? Does his conversation with his father [pp. 253-255] reveal similarities between them? Why does Kaushik say, “I didn’t know which was worse–the idea of my father remarrying for love, or of his actively seeking out a stranger for companionship” [p. 255]? Does the time he spends with his father’s new family offer an alternate, more complex, explanation for his father’s decision?

10. What role do his stepsisters play in Kaushik’s willingness to accept his father’s marriage? Why is he so outraged by their fascination with the pictures of his mother? He later reflects, “in their silence they continued to both protect and punish me” [p.293]. In what ways does their silence and the reasons for it mirror Kaushik’s own behavior, both here and in “Once in a Lifetime”?

11. How do “Once in a Lifetime” and “Year’s End” set the stage for “Going Ashore,” the final story in the trilogy? What traces of their younger selves are visible in both Hema and Kaushik? In what ways do the paths they’ve chosen reflect or oppose the journeys their parents made as immigrants?

12. Why does Hema find the idea of an arranged marriage appealing? How has her affair with Julian affected her ideas about romantic love? What does her description of her relationship with Navin [pp. 296-298] reveal about what she thinks she wants and needs in a relationship? What role do her memories of her parents’ marriage play in her vision of married life?

13. What motivates Kaushik’s decision to become a photojournalist? In what ways does the peripatetic life of a photojournalist suit his idea of himself? In addition to the many moves his family made, what other experiences make him grow up to be an outsider, “away from the private detritus of life” [p. 309]?

14. What does the reunion in Rome reveal about the ties that bind Hema and Kaushik despite their many years of separation? What does it illustrate about their attempts to escape from the past and their parents’ way of life? What do they come to realize about themselves and the plans they have made as the intimacy between them escalates? Why does Lahiri introduce Hema’s voice as the narrator of the final pages?

15. In what ways does “Going Ashore” bring together the themes threaded through the earlier stories? What does the ending demonstrate about realities of trying to find a home in the world?

16. The stories in Unaccustomed Earth offer a moving, highly original perspective on the clash between family and cultural traditions and the search for individual identity. How does the sense of displacement felt by the older, immigrant generation affect their American-born children? What accommodations do the children make to their parents’ way of life? In trying to fit in with their American friends, do they sacrifice their connections to their heritage? In what ways are the challenges they face more complex than those of their parents?

17. Several stories feature marriages between an Indian-American and an American–and in once case, English—spouse. What characteristics do these mixed marriages share? In what ways does becoming parents themselves bring up (or renew) questions about cultural identity? What emotions arise as they contemplate the differences between the families they’re creating and those in which they grew up?

Read More Show Less

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 153 )
Rating Distribution

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 153 Customer Reviews

  • Posted July 11, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

    Delightful Read! I did not want it to end.

    Jhumpa Lahiri has a beautiful way of drawing the reader into her characters and their stories. I actually believed that I was reading a collection of short stories until I was half way through the book when it dawned on me that I was reading a novel. Ms. Lahiri has a marvelous gift for surprise that keeps the reader in a perpetual state of wanting to learn more about her characters and their lives. Each story holds it's own on an individual basis and yet when taken collectively they make a a breathtaking collage. I would invite anyone to appreciates the written word to pick up a copy of her book and indulge themselves.

    6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted June 13, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    Olive Kitteridge
    Interpreter of Maladies
    The Namesake

    Even better than The Interpreter of Maladies

    Call me a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri's beautiful writing. I loved her first Pulitzer prize winning book of short stories and last winter when I was reading her novel, The Namesake, I heard that this book was even better than the Pulitzer prize winning short story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. It proved to be the truth. I loved this short story collection at least as much as the first, if not more. Reading these stories transported me to familiar, yet slightly foreign, culture where I lived for the duration of my reading experience. Ending the last story was like finishing a sad but hopeful novel because a series of interrelated stories concluded the book.

    From my perspective, you can't go wrong with this author. I love her writing and look forward to whatever she publishes next. Her stories are a piece of 21st century America infused with strong cultural perspectives. Her characters are universal yet highly culturally bound...a delight to experience.

    4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 14, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    The Namesake
    Interpreter of Maladies
    The Namesake

    Lahiri's best

    I've read all three of her books - I think this might be her best. I loved The Namesake, but she tries new techniques as a writer here. And she has the power to hit you with once sentence that just kills you in the middle of a story.<BR/><BR/>The third story - Only Goodness - really hit home for me. I'm glad the Indian community has a voice like this. And if you're not Indian, I think you might enjoy her books even more because she sheds light on a new world of Indian-American fusion. Great great book. I devoured it in a weekend - I think you'll do the same!

    4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 17, 2010

    Wonderful Read Even if Short Stories Aren't Your Thing

    Didn't think I was a fan of short stories but these are incredible. Lahiri is an accessible yet deep writer -- Try Interpreter of Maladies too.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 7, 2010

    Excellent Collection of Short Stories

    I just finished this book and I was impressed with the writing style and ability to keep the reader's attention. I generally do not read short stories but this book was well worth making an exception. Each story provides a vivid image of the cultural clashes the characters experience with their traditional Indian/Bengali values upon being assimilated into the western culture through their respective journeys. I especially enjoyed the "Hema & Khausik" part that explored the lives of two lovers from their childhood and how they manage to reunite after years of separation. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in romance novels, Indian culture, classic literature, or anyone looking for a good book to have for a book club or to escape reality.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted April 5, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    The Time Traveler's Wife
    The Namesake

    Touching and Heartbreaking

    For anyone who has read Lahiri's The Namesake, you know that she is a fantastic writer. In many ways, that skill becomes detrimental in this book of short stories: you become so attached to the characters that you don't want the story to end! There is beauty in the way short stories work, but I loved each one so much that I wished she would write a book about each of them. However, be prepared for unexpected endings. And by unexpected I mean probably not what you prefer. Her stories are beautiful, but at times I wished for an over-the-top magical happy ending, but this is not her. That is not to say that there is subtle beauty and happiness in the ending of each--all the characters experience epiphanic moments that are critical to their existence. However, while the book should be read by all, you may want to pick an upbeat book to read afterward.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 9, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857

    The stories are full of south Asian immigrant family experiences where children of fitst generation highly educated Indian sub-continent families come of age in America and their adapting to challenges of life here...

    The stories invariably bring to life immense pressure to succeed that children of first generation immigrants from Indian sub-continent face while growing up in households that straddle two cultures. While most of the characters come out of this crucible with admirable credentials and ability to balance their background and their new American identity, there are some who stumble and therein lies Jhumpa's mixture of empathy and dread of their predicament.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 26, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    The Namesake
    Interpreter of Maladies

    A Warm and Intricate Tapestry of Character

    I read Interpreter of the Maladies several years ago in a literature class and fell in love with Ms. Lahiri's style of story telling. I can visualize and actually hear the voices of her characters and feel, at times, as though I know these people. The title story, Unaccustomed Earth was the most touching of the stories, but none let me down.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 18, 2012

    Stellar.

    Extraordinary read. Dive in and don't worry about drowning.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 12, 2011

    An Insightful View of Family- Recommended Reading.

    In Jhumpa Lahiri's newest collection of short stories, she highlights the tragedies and minute triumphs of familial relations. Throughout each story, Lahiri weaves a fairly simply web. Though most of the plats are predictable, they are crafty and imaginative because they're predictable. Lahiri seems to be aware of each ploy of family life and through this, is able to render and portray emotions in imaginative ways. her placid voice is tragic, yet evokes feeling that is not generally associated with those in our lives that we are supposed to "unconditionally" love and cherish. Lahiri even made me realize things about my own family and the ability of a writer to create a connection between the reader and the characters is a talent that many writers are not graced with.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 5, 2010

    Original compilation of short stories

    Excellent book

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted December 28, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    Interpreter of Maladies
    Unaccustomed Earth
    The Namesake

    Another Lahiri Triumph

    I became a Lahiri fan after seeing the movie "The Namesake" then reading "The Interpreter of Maladies". If you liked either one of those novels,you will enjoy this as well. The short story format does not allow for as much character development as the author's other books, but her talent as a story teller, and her unique voice as Indian American shine through nevertheless.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 16, 2012

    captivating read

    i loved this book from beginning to end. her characters are so realistic and have so
    much nuance and depth; no sugar coating here. can't wait for her next book.

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  • Posted April 25, 2010

    Finding a place

    The characters in this short story collection are varied, interesting and thoughtful. Even with the feeling that all of them could have attended a party in The Namesake (Lahiri's elegant, acclaimed novel), they are skillfully delineated and caringly presented in the transitions each confronts: whether to stay in an imperfect marriage; or to shield an incipient romance from the eyes of adult children. Lahiri's understanding of the struggle with choice is nuanced and beautifully delivered. Beyond the individual transitions, the understanding of people standing balanced between a new culture embraced cautiously and the culture left beyond the transitional airports in Europe is thought eliciting. Whether this helps with recognition of your own path, or helping to make sense of another's, this is a timely contribution and challenge to facile discourse on immigration.

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  • Posted March 18, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Great Book Club Book!

    We did Unaccustomed Earth for book club and I was amazed how successful the discussion was. Everyone- and we are a diverse range of ages and backgrounds- got something out of this book, a testament to Lahiri's remarkable weaving of generational perspectives and the juxtaposition of two cultures, old and new. It provides an opportunity to explore what it is to be a first generation immigrant and how different that is from being established in one's birth country. We discussed cultural responsibilities and the decisions the characters made for themselves in spite of or in favor of their family's expectations. Her writing style is elegant and descriptive without being flowery, and her gentle way of inviting the reader into her character's lives and minds is unique.

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  • Posted January 18, 2010

    more from one of the best writers writing today

    lahiri is an astonishingly good writer. this collection is beautiful and very very satisfying, as i am much more a reader of novels than short fiction and didn't feel like i was losing the deep reading experience that a novel provides. i only wish she were more prolific. but i guess the cultivation of genius takes time.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 16, 2010

    Excellent

    Exellent reading.

    0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 19, 2009

    Not usually a fan of short stories, but I liked this one

    I really like Jhumpa Lahiri's writing style. Have read her other books, but I don't usually enjoy short stories, so I was hesitant to try this book, but I am glad I did. It is well written and even though the stories are short, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 5, 2009

    Fantastic!

    Excellent collection of short stories. Thought provoking!

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  • Posted October 13, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Great Collection of Short Stories

    I enjoyed this book much more than Namesake. The central theme appears to be the struggle between two generations of Indian immigrants. Children of immigrants struggling to find their way in America while dealing with the expectations of parents holding to their native land's tradition.

    In many ways the situations and struggles are universal: loss of love, death, alcoholism, marital disappointments, etc. However, Lahiri masterfully weaves the cultural ties the characters face

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