Literary Safari

By way of Paper Cuts, news of Sangam House, a new international writers residency program in Pondicherry, India, a town in South India known best for Auroville, the “township devoted to an experiment in human unity.”

Sangam House is a brand new undertaking, a partnership between the Danish Council for the Arts, Finnish Literature Exchange, Random House India, the Sahitya Akademi for the Letters, and freeDimensional, an organization dedicated to finding safe havens for artists of all disciplines who have been put in danger directly because of their work.Applications for the inaugural residency session this winter are currently being accepted. From the website:

The word sangam in Sanskrit literally means “going together.” In most Indian languages, sangam has come to mean such confluences as the flowing together of rivers and coincidence. The intention of Sangam House is to bring together writers from around the world to live and work in a safe, peaceful setting. The world we live in makes a space such as this necessary on many levels.

Assembling writers from various cultural backgrounds broadens the scope of each individual’s work. Exposure to regional and national trends in literature, to multiple political and economic obstacles and varied social and cultural milieus enhances each writer’s understanding of his/her work, as well as his/her own notions of identity and home.

… Most importantly, our residency programs are designed for writers who have published to some acclaim but not yet enjoyed substantial commercial success. Sangam House seeks to give writers (and we include here translators, poets, playwrights and those involved in creating fiction and non-fiction works) a chance to build a substantial and influential network of personal and professional relationships that can deepen their own work, in effect, expanding and diversifying literature. We understand that literature can and should evolve, allowing it to remain a thriving force of illumination for our times.

More on application guidelines here.

And, while we’re at it, other artist’s residency opportunities in India:In New Delhi, Global Arts Village and in Bangalore, Khoj International Artists Association.

When I was in India in January, I ended up hanging out at Mumbai airport for about 4 hours while waiting for a domestic flight. In one corner of the terminal was a group of twenty-something year-olds – mostly boys and two girls or so — all dressed in jeans and tee-shirts, all with longish flippy hair. One of them was carrying a guitar and they were all sitting in a circle, close together, humming, strumming, and singing English songs that sounded like a cross between David Byrne and Bon Jovi. I tried to park myself near them and kept trying to figure out their story. I never did—it was the middle of the night and I was an unabashed victim of jetlag—but in my mind, I’d made up a story about them — they were college buddies traveling together (probably to Goa); maybe they were even a band, getting amped to sit on the beach around a campfire singing their songs after a full-moon rave at Anjuna Beach. …

I was reminded of this scene when I read Akshay Ahuja’s feature essay on the Indian subculture of heavy metal in the April issue of Guernica, a print and online magazine of art and politics. In “Death Metal and the Indian Identity”, writer Akshay Ahuja is asked to carry a guitar to India for his father’s colleague’s son. The guitar is to be delivered to Pradyam, who is part of “a semi-pro death metal band” called Cremated Souls (now defunct).

A simple guitar delivery leads Akshay Ahuja into the vibrant subculture of heavy metal in India, as he becomes friends with Pradyam and his band members, many of whom work at call centers.

There are several sections in the piece where the author makes small observations about the little differences and nuances between India and America, cultural and otherwise. These gave me pause, not only because some of them rang true, but also because I enjoyed the way they were being articulated in a very specific context.

For example:

A few days later Pradyum came to my parents’ house on a black Royal Enfield motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket. He was strong and well-built. I found out later that until a few years ago, he had been serious about track and field before a scooter accident had crushed his leg. Pradyum would drop me off several times after this, but this was the only time he came inside. He was always afraid that he smelled like cigarettes (he smoked constantly) and that this would offend my parents. Once in the house, he complimented my mother on her beautiful home—and such a nice garden! This immense politeness was strangely incongruous. Looking just like James Dean, he had all the American gestures of rebelliousness, but without the appropriate American attitude. (more…)

Journalist V. V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel “Love Marriage” [book excerpt] is a haunting family drama about the ramifications of decades of civil war in Sri Lanka. [check out this review.] It hit bookshelves earlier this month, and while on her book tour, Sugi took a few minutes to answer some questions via e-mail about the book, her writing process, and her inspirations.

You began Love Marriage as your senior thesis, I’ve read. Was there a particular image or incident that inspired it, apart, of course, from your own background as the child of Sri Lankan immigrants? No single thing inspired the book. The first page seemed to write itself, almost by accident. They were just some musings, but then I took them into a creative writing class, and my classmates were very encouraging about it and wanted to hear more from that voice. That voice belonged to a particular character who was starting to realize how Sri Lankan politics had affected—and continued to affect—her family. And therefore her.

Why did you choose to write the novel in these vignettes? Did this form help you accomplish something that a straight narrative could not? The currency of family stories is the anecdote. This is the manner in which most of learn about our families, so in that way it is organic to the story.

Time is dealt with in interesting ways in Love Marriage . There are two sections in the novel that I thought were especially powerful where you describe simultaneous events – they are almost cinematic. For example, while the main character Yalini is being born, Black July is happening in Sri Lanka. Can you address the question of parallels? There are lots of parallels in the book. Some were quite intentional, and others were not. I hadn’t really thought of the birth scene as a parallel until you mentioned it, but I suppose it is. I think of it as the one moment when Murali is in two places at once. Here is this young Sri Lankan couple having their first child, and it’s supposed to be this joyous moment. And it is. And yet at the same time Murali has this singular experience of watching disaster at home through the lens of the news. He is watching it and he is not part of it. There’s the distance of the eye of the camera. And at the same time he is a part of it in two weird ways: He is part of a removed group of viewers, and he can also imagine himself on the screen. He’s powerless, except for the act of viewing and knowing that.

Quite often when we see upsetting news about the developing world, or countries in the East, on the news, it is a strange experience. What does it mean to show violence, and show violence, and show violence?

When I first heard the title of the book, I have to admit that I thought, “Oh, no, another book about love vs. arranged marriages” – but that presumption was very quickly blown away. At the end of the novel, we come to see the notion of marriage as many different things, between people but also between “person and a country.” In light of current political climate, was there a political statement that you wanted to make with this novel? Of course the book is political. It has a range of characters with a range of political opinions. The Sri Lankan diaspora’s political views are sometimes understood as two opposite poles with nothing in between. (As though arranged marriage and love marriage were the only two kinds of marriage.) But there are so many communities and opinions and conversations out there. It’s important to create room for dissent in any dialogue—and this one in particular.

Yalini spends much of the novel digging up her family history. In this way, she reminded me very much of myself, always trying to find out my family’s stories – so many of which are buried deep. There are talkers and there are people like Yalini’s mother, who tells about herself by talking about other people. I take it that you conducted many interviews for this book. Was it difficult to get people talking about their painful memories? It depended on the person and their personal situation, but most people were very open about it. If I had been doing something journalistic, perhaps that might have been more difficult.

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I recently read the pop-up version of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a creepy tale about a nine year-old girl who gets lost in the Appalachian forest. For anyone going hiking, caution: don’t read this before you enter the woods. It had been a while since I closely read a pop-up, so I had a great time with it. Here’s a sample spread.

Anyway, I was wondering about the making of such books, so was more than glad of the Paul Barman’s short piece in this month’s Wired, “The Science of Pop-Ups.”

The toughest part of designing a pop-up book isn’t getting the 3-D figures to pop open — it’s getting the damn things to fold back down again as the book is closed. That’s why Robert Sabuda, the reigning king of the pop-up jungle, is known not just as an artist but also as a formidable engineer.

Check out the making of a single pop-up in this neat slideshow of images, photographs taken by Todd Tankersley.

One of the most fascinating reported pieces I’ve read in recent months was in the New Yorker’s Journeys issue (April 21, 2008): Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators, by Nick Paumgarten. It tells the heartbreaking story about a former production manager at Business Week whose life was never the same after he got stuck in an elevator.

At the same time, it delves into:

> Elevator Lore. Did you know:

“In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works.”

> Elevator Etiquette. Now that I’ve read this description, I couldn’t ride the elevators at work today without noticing this pattern:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. … “

> Design principles and advances. Who knew there was such a thing as “elevatoring”?

“[It ] refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. … It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.

> The metaphor of the elevator in literature.

“While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down? In “The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about elevator inspectors, the conveyance itself is more conceit than thing; the plot concerns, among other things, the quest for a “black box,” a perfect elevator, but the nature of its perfection remains mysterious. …”

This last section got me thinking about and trying to remember more well-known literary works, including songs, all about elevators. I was sure that there was more out there, besides the titles mentioned above and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, by Roald Dahl, which Paumgarten also brought up in the article. So, here’s what I was able to dig up.

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An Na [author website] is a National Book Award nominee and Printz Award-winning author. Her latest young adult novel “The Fold” looks at the phenomenon of double eyelid fold plastic surgery in the Korean-American community. Read my review of the book here. In the following e-mail interview, An Na responded to my questions about the inspiration for the book, the challenges of being a writer of color, and more.

You tackle a pretty serious subject, plastic surgery, with a humorous touch in this book, for example the larger-than-life character “Michael.” What inspired this book? A few years back a friend was putting together an anthology around the topic of beauty and she asked me to contribute. Immediately I thought about the time my sister was offered the fold surgery to make her eyes more “beautiful.” I idea for Michael just comes from popular culture. There are so many stars and models and just ordinary folks turning to plastic surgery and in many ways the idea of going under the knife has been normalized. I wanted to explore how one teen would deal with being offered a procedure that was not only about making themselves beautiful but also colored by cultural standards of beauty.

In a sense, The Fold is not just about Asian Americans struggling to conform to Western standards of beauty. It’s about the challenge to conform to certain notions of beauty–a challenge that many teenagers face. How did your experiences as a teenager compare to Joyce’s experiences? I remember doing all sorts of crazy things to make myself look better. A lot of it centered around the idea of that magical summer. The idea that when I come back in the fall, everyone is going to think I’m different and gorgeous and popular. You know what I mean, right?! I’ve permed by hair (imagine crazy Korean afro), gone to the dermatologist, shopped for clothes, make up, etc. but I’ve never gone beyond the superficial stuff. I don’t even have my ears pierced. In fact, the whole idea of Joyce and her hating pain comes from me. I’m just too chicken in many ways but I think that’s good.

You’ve written two other critically-acclaimed young adult novels. Tell me: How do you connect and get into the teenage mindset, write from their point of view? I find that a lot of my stories are about needing to answer the longing that I had as a teen reader without the books to reflect her experiences. I find that I gravitate to the characters who are still trying to find themselves and feel okay about who they are and where they come from. It doesn’t take too much for me to get back into that mind set. In many ways, when I am placed in uncomfortable situations or at parties or in a room full of strangers, I still feel those awkward teen years of feeling unsure and questioning whether I fit in.

The Fold, I thought, was stylistically different from your two previous books–A Step from Heaven and Wait for Me–not so much about internal family challenges and struggles to find the American Dream, as much as it was about the coming of age experience. What prompted this shift? I like the challenge of trying something new. I like playing with structure and voices and this time I wanted to see if I could write in more of a traditional style because I had never written a straight chapter book before. It was also fun to try and think about crazy over the top scenarios for my characters. I wanted to do something light and funny but with still some harder issues in there.

How did you go about researching this book? What is the one thing you learned about the fold surgery that you did not know before writing this novel? I looked at a lot of sites online and also tapped into my own memory of what I knew about the surgery. There’s a documentary out there about a woman who goes through with the surgery and an MTV special. So finding material wasn’t hard, it was just dealing with looking at the surgery photos which was the killer. I had to cover up the photos so that I could read the articles. Mostly, it was interesting to learn about the medical terminology and procedure for how they create the fold. I learned that it was a fairly straightforward procedure but still, with any kind of surgery there are risks involved and I think a lot of that gets glossed over because there are so many people changing the way they look with plastic surgery.

You portrayed both the pros and cons of the surgery in the novel, yet it’s obvious which side you stand on. Do you think the frequency of such operations is diminishing, or becoming more of “the norm”? Definitely becoming more of the norm. If singers and movie stars are talking about their own procedures as though it is no big deal then you know the average teen is going to start believing that and soon enough they begin to save up their money and get obsessive about whatever part they want to change and then they have a brand new nose or eyes or breast.

Mothers and sisters play an important role in this as well as in your other novels. Both Wait for Me and The Fold have the conflict between older and younger sister and the theme of responsibility. How come? I think it plays a big part in my novels because it played a big part in my life. I have a wonderful younger sister and she and I were always attached at the hip. Sometimes I hated it and sometimes I didn’t mind but most times I just expected her to be near me. In Korean culture, sibling relationships and the responsibility of the older sibling to care for the younger members of the family is a role that is taken very seriously.

What are the challenges of being an Asian-American young adult author? Do publishers expect you to write about certain topics more than others? How do you think the landscape is changing for other Asian American authors?
I think the challenge of any writer of color is not feeling pigeon holed to only write about certain topics. Luckily, I’ve been with good editors who only expect good stories in whatever form that may come, but for me, at this point in my work, I still find myself needing to deal with the AA issues. There has been a wonderful explosion of AA writers and stories out there. I think its fabulous! We have more of a presence and a group of us have banded together to promote Asian American History month in May. Look for us at www.FUSIONSTORIES.com.

What are you working on next? I have a young adult novel that I have been working on for the last five years entitled THE MIDDLE PLACE and a middle grade novel that I am trying to get started.

During my freshman year in college, I was making my bed and listening to the radio when I heard an advertisement with a catchy jingle, for … “giving the gift of plastic surgery to teens.”

“Can you believe this?” I said, turning to one of my roommates. She blushed and stammered, then said, “Yes. Umm… actually, when I turned 16, my grandfather’s gift to me was a nose job.” My Jewish roommate had grown up in “the Valley,” the burbs of LA, and in her neck of the woods, this was actually a popular (and commonplace) gift, it turned out.

This memory came flooding back to me when I read National Book Award finalist and Printz Award-winning author An Na’s latest novel, The Fold (G.P. Putnam, April 2008).

Summer’s here and while working at her parents’ Korean restaurant, Joyce has big plans to remake herself before her senior year of high school—with the help of her best friend Gina. If only she can become as beautiful as her older sister Helen, she’s convinced that she’ll be able to win over the most gorgeous guy in her school, John Ford Kang (yes, JFK for short). Then her rich plastic-surgery-addict aunt Gomo (aka “Michael” as in Michael Jackson) wins the lottery and offers everyone in the family a share of her winnings, in the form of a gift. To Joyce, she offers an extreme makeover—a free fold surgery which would make her eyes look “prettier” and more “American.”

“Like most Asian girls, Joyce knew about the san-gah-pu-rhee or double eyelid fold surgery, but Joyce didn’t actually know anyone who had gone through with it except for Gomo, and that didn’t really count. Once a few years back, when Joyce and her family had visited Korea, her cousin had showed her some magazines and said she dreamed about getting the surgery that many girls in Korea got as birthday or graduation presents. Joyce recalled being slightly curious, but waved it off as just another crazy Korean fad.

Joyce studied the poster-sized close-up of the model’s face. The layers of color on her eyelids fanned out like the feathers of a peacock. Now tht Joyce’s attention had been drawn to this detail, she couldn’t stop staring at the fold or lack of a fold in all the women she knew and met.”

After reading this book, neither could I. As Joyce struggles to decide whether or not to go under the knife, her sister grapples with her aunt’s matchmaking efforts and a larger secret about her sexuality that Joyce would never have imagined.

Unlike An Na’s previous books which were written in the form of lyrical vignettes, this novel is a much more straightforward plot-driven YA narrative. Yet, the qualities and themes of An Na’s writing that I appreciated in her previous books come through here too—the themes of family, responsibility, and identity; the exploration of a teenager’s realization that things are never quite what they seem; and, the juxtaposition of humor and sadness. The character of Gomo or “Michael” is one that I will not soon forget, not just because she’s so out there but also because by being out there, she in fact reminds me of several people I know – individuals who are constantly seeking to change themselves.

As a teenager, there weren’t many books I came across that invited me to question the prevalent beauty myths and to become more comfortable with who I was. In this respect, especially, The Fold is a valuable new addition to the bibliography of young adult literature about perceptions and standards of beauty–not just for Asian Americans. It asks an important question: How far would you go for beauty?

Pair it with Scott Westerfield’s Uglies and the other books in the series, which are about “a world in which everyone has an operation when they turn sixteen, making them supermodel beautiful. Big eyes, full lips, no one fat or skinny. This seems like a good thing, but it’s not. Especially if you’re one of the uglies, a bunch of radical teens who’ve decided they want to keep their own faces.”

Thanks to Notcot (via Cool Infographics), a super-cool post about visual artist Stefanie Posavec’s works that are on display at the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield, UK as part of an exhibit called “On the Map.” Posavec’s maps visualize the patterns and structure of language in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. She developed algorithms to represent the rhythm of his language, the themes addressed in the book, and the length of his sentences!

To quote Notcot:

Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The maps … are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.

In the book’s context:

Definitely check out these and other hi-res images of these maps over at Notcot.

Those who know me well often joke that I’d make a good spokesperson for a Google ad. I can’t help it if Google has changed my life (and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way). The google desktop app has saved my writing life more times than I care to mention, and google calendar is the means by which my husband and I can always convince each other to attend otherwise resisted events (“Oh, you couldn’t make it? I had no idea. Your google calendar said you were free!”)So, of course, my curiosity piqued when I recently read about Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent book deal with the University of California Press.

Per Publisher’s Weekly:

THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING: How one company is transforming culture, commerce and community – and why we should worry, showing how Google is taking on governments, organizations and entire industries – and the implications of Google knowing more about us than we know about it.

(The book began as an open book experiment sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book, where Vaidhyanathan is a fellow, and was subsequently picked up for publication.)

Vaidhyanathan is a rising cultural historian and media scholar whose two previous books Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System have met with wide praise.

He is approaching the book as both a fan and as a critic, he says at his website: “I am in awe of all that Google has done and all it hopes to do. I am also wary of its ambition and power.”

In a talk titled “The Googlization of Everything” that he gave last week at Penn State, Vaidhyanathan used the example of a google search result of the word “Siva” (the #1 result is the Smashing Pumpkins 1991 music video for “Siva,” not the Hindu god of the same name) to raise the question of just how universal Google actually is.

From an article in Penn State’s campus paper The Collegian Online:

“The Smashing Pumpkins were a once relevant band from Chicago,” Siva Vaidhyanathan said. “There are a billion Hindus … You would think that would be the most important thing. This gives us some indication that the Google universe does not map to the rest of the world.” …

[If you run the search yourself, a list of his books comes up first under Google Books, then the Smashing Pumpkins, then a wikipedia write-up on “Shiva” (the more common spelling for the Hindu god of destruction), then his website. Hmmm….] From the same article:

“Google actually has a pretty profound and perhaps disturbing role in what we consider to be valuable, true and important … “Millions, perhaps billions, of people use Google everyday. We are not Google’s consumers; we are Google’s products. The advertisers are the consumers,” Vaidhyanathan said, [criticizing Google’s collection of detailed records and user information.] … “Google knows everything about many of us and a lot about almost all of us. Google knows your interests, your passions, maybe your fetishes.” Vaidhyanathan pointed to Google’s official mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” “It’s a stunning mission statement for any company,” he said. “But it’s the universality we have to question. How universal is Google? We know it doesn’t work exactly the same way in China.”

Vaidhyanathan’s starting point is that Google is a part of our lives and that we talk about it as though it were Divine — think of the good versus evil paradigm that has been set up in the google universe — but that it is something we need to take a closer look at, especially when it comes to consumer surveillance and copyright.

From another interesting article at the U. Va. website: “Discussing the role of the consumer, Siva notes another Google illusion – that of the free service. We pay for Google with our data – our searching habits, our surfing habits – and this fuels Google’s cash cow, personalized advertising.” [link]

The book will be out sometime next year, and in the meantime, we’ll all keep using our various google apps and accounts more than ever … won’t we?

Read this post at Sepia Mutiny.

A current event take on my off-and-on Family Ruminations series. You can read the conversations it generated over at Sepia Mutiny, where this was originally posted.

Representatives from 14 African nations were in New Delhi for the first-ever India-Africa summit, which just ended today. (The India-Africa Summit follows closely on the heels of the China-Africa summit of November 2006.)

Attendees signed off on the Delhi Declaration and the Africa-India Framework for Cooperation, pledging cooperation in the areas of energy, terrorism, climate change and UN Reforms. An informal and equally important outcome: India is looking to play a far more prominent role in Africa’s economic development than China in coming years.

My uncle Gobind is a retired World Bank developmental economist who has served as economic adviser to the government of Ghana. I asked him to share his thoughts on this historic summit.

“While India is less prominent than China in Africa today, both in trade and investments and aid,” he said, “it is more respected than China because of its image, its democracy, its presence in education, industry— especially pharmaceuticals and railways, and IT. There is growing interest in Africa in India, but it is not yet a hot issue, except for mining companies and the new private oil companies like Reliance. India is currently big in Sudan, DRC, Nigeria, Zambia and S. Africa. But it’s increasing its presence everywhere.”

The Emerging Economy report, released yesterday, underlined the role of Indian corporations in driving new technology usage in Africa. From the Earth Times [full story link]:

Chinese corporations have made significant investments in Africa over the past decade. For example, China’s Civil Engineering Construction Corporation is building the $8.3 billion railroad linking Lagos and Kano. However, the Report also points out that Indian entrepreneurs have long enjoyed trading relations in Africa, particularly along the continent’s east coast, running from Kenya down to the tip of South Africa. In the early part of the 20th century Indian engineering and consumer brands were considered as reliable as those coming from Europe. Bilateral trade between India and Africa increased from less than US$ 1 billion in 1991 to over US$ 9 billion in 2005. Today, the Government of India is aiming to achieve a trade turnover of US$ 500 billion by 2010.

My grandfather might be one of those Indian entrepreneurs referred to above. In the 1930s, Dada came to West Africa as apprentice to an Indian trading company. He ended up placing his roots down in Ghana where he opened a chain of movie theaters and imported movies from India and China for a rural audience.

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Kahani, the award-winning South Asian children’s literary magazine, recently won its second Parents’ Choice Award. I’m excited about the latest issue, themed “Rock the Vote” (and its fun cover image!), which sends the message that “you’re never too young to Rock the Vote,” i.e. get involved in the political process.

My short story “Operation Turtle Rescue” is one of the features in this issue: Nikhil starts a petition drive to save the turtles crossing the road near his school. Will he get enough signatures?

Here’s a snippet of the story, which was inspired by an article I read about a group of 2nd graders in Canada who formed a group called Kids 4 Turtles. Together they started a petition and raised $4000 to put up turtle crossing signs in their town. (These signs reduced turtle road kill by 30%!)

This issue of Kahani also features “Old Enough,” a short story by Uma Krishnaswami. Its premise: Global warming has wreaked havoc on earth and its remaining residents have taken refuge in the underground. Will democracy rise again? There’s also a look at politician’s methods for getting the world out and electronic voting in India and the U.S., as well as tips on getting involved in politics as a young person.

If you have been thinking about a subscription for that little kid in your life, maybe this is a good time?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-awaited collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, hits bookshelves this week. As she makes her way around the US on an eight-city tour (she has a sold-out reading at Symphony Space tonight), gushing reviews have started pouring in. The Village Voice’s Lenora Todaro compares Lahiri to a “young Alice Munro” and praises the emotional wisdom of these stories. [link]

Eight long short stories (three of which were previously published in the New Yorker) make up this striking collection whose title was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same wornout soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

The Christian Science Monitor [link] says of Unaccustomed Earth: “Returning to themes she explored in her first novel, “The Namesake,” Pulitzer-Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri details with quiet precision the divide between American-born children and their Bengali parents in her new short-story collection.”

I disagree. I don’t think this book is so much about the divide between generations as it is about the lives of the second-generation, the lives of the children of immigrants. The parents here play a secondary role – they are lenses through which children grow to understand themselves better.

Lisa Fugard of the Los Angeles Times gets it when she writes [link], “In her latest work, “Unaccustomed Earth,” a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”

In New York magazine’s profile of Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Confidence Artist: Jhumpa Lahiri Isn’t Afraid to Provoke Tears” [link], Boris Kachka writes:

Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “ ’Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.”

Yes, Lahiri’s latest stories are once again about Bengali Americans, many of them set in Cambridge and London (where she was born), but keep going and it’s obvious that she has gone further and deeper, taken a turn in another direction, choosing to write about the experiences of second-generation Indian-Americans, about their fraught relationships with their parents, about multi-racial marriages, and at the end of it all, the human condition. (Elsewhere in Unaccustomed Earth, she takes us to Italy, Thailand, London, but what she does keep coming back to is Mass., Cambridge.)

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