Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Review)

Released April 2008 (Knopf) * 352 pages * ISBN 13: 9780676979343

I have to admit that I’m not usually a fan of short stories, but they are starting to grow on me now that I’ve subscribed to Asimov’s, Analog, and NeoOpsis (which is what I should be catching up on instead of books). Where was I going with this? Oh right, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories. And I liked them … a lot, actually, since I still remember the characters several weeks and several books later.

Anyway, the book is split into two parts. The first part is 5 short stories of unrelated characters. The second part is three stories about the same two characters told about different times in their lives and from different points of view. The connecting thread of all stories in the book is that they are about Bengali immigrants to America and their struggles to honour their heritage and accept their new circumstances. Lahiri focuses on the struggles of family, love, and death.

Lahiri provides a lot of information about Bengali culture without making you feel like you are being taught anything (a skill I’m still working on myself). The characters and situations are believable and cross cultures. I particularly enjoyed the second part of the book where all the stories dealt with the same characters and I got to spend more time with them.

I was going to pass this book on when I was done with it, not thinking that I would enjoy it. Much to my surprise, this is a book that I will reread which is the highest compliment that I can pay a book.

I’ve tagged this book for the ACOA collection only because there is a short story on alcoholism in the family that I thought might be of interest. I’m always wondering how others deal with it or imagine it would be dealt with. I’ve made a note to myself to come back and revisit that particular story from an ACOA perspective and put up a separate post on it.

My only complaint (which you will hear about again if you read more reviews here) is that the publisher has chosen to grind the pages so that they are uneven. This is done to give the illusion of books of yesteryear when pages weren’t bound so uniformly, but it just annoys me because it makes the pages difficult to turn and to flip through to find wherever you left off reading (yes, I know of bookmarks, but that doesn’t help when you fall asleep while reading and wake up to find the book on the floor imitating a lemming having fallen from a great height).

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