Some of the stories in the collection are "ancient," she says. "They have in fact been around in my mind for more than a decade. Even as I was finishing The Namesake, I had a couple of story ideas on the backburner." Four of the eight stories in the collection were published in The New Yorker. She wanted to work on them before she started her second novel, she adds.
Lahiri, an internationally bestselling writer, was born in London in 1967 and raised in Rhode Island. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a BA in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an MA in English, MA in Creative Writing and MA in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a PhD in Renaissance Studies.
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. It was turned into a fine film by Mira Nair last year and became an art-house hit in America, Canada and India, earning a respectable $20 million worldwide.
Buy Unaccustomed Earth from rediff.com
There are over one million copies in print of each of Jhumpa Lahiri's first two books, which have been translated into more than 30 languages. Her new book will have more than 300,000 copies printed in America alone. Just about two dozen novelists have such large printing of their work.
In a business that often sees newer writers stumble after an auspicious debut, Lahiri proves with her new collection of stories that she, like Alice Munroe, has an extraordinary talent to tell stories that stay in one's mind long after we have read them, many times more than once. Like the fabled R K Narayan, Lahiri's stories may sound simple and captivating but dwell on our increasingly complicated lives, and are life-affirming, full of wisdom.
Although this is a collection of eight stories, including a trio of linked tales, many readers will find it difficult to stop with just one story. They will find it difficult to hold the next story until the day after. This is the kind of book you read as if it were a novel, a page-turner that relegates the Sunday crossword and even the latest DVD to lower priorities. Once you finish, you will promise yourself to start all over again. For you want to enjoy fully its deceptively simple prose. You want to savour Lahiri's talent for baring the souls of her characters. You want to understand how they deal with their heartaches, separations, reunions, love affairs and bereavements.
As I finished reading Unaccustomed Earth in two days, keeping aside the latest John Grisham that I was halfway through, as well as Alice Munro, I was reminded of Lahiri's introduction to R K Narayan's Malgudi Days in a special edition brought out last year to mark his 100th death anniversary. She proposed readers take up one story per day for 32 consecutive days. 'And if you are the type of virtuous person who is satisfied after just one piece of chocolate from a chocolate box, never tempted until the following day by a second, then perhaps you will be able to savour Malgudi Days in this restrained fashion,' she wrote.
It is better not to have any such plan as far as Unaccustomed Earth is concerned; instead, surrender to it straightaway.
Also read: Jhumpa Lahiri wins Pulitzer
