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Unaccustomed Earth
by: Jhumpa Lahiri

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307265739
ISBN: 0307265730
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: April 01, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: April 01, 2008
Sales Rank: 103
Studio: Knopf

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:

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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Lahirism
I used to think the mid-point between optimism and pessimism was realism--before reading the ineffable work of Jhumpa Lahiri in this collection of short stories. There exists no term for what she achieves in these delicately sliced portions of intersecting lives. It is not that no one accomplishes all that seems possible for them, not that no one is as ultimately afflicted as they could be, although these two outcomes hold true in every tale. It is that her characters and their situations (which include the other characters) seem to evolve to a precise center between the worst that could have happened to them and the best.

There are other apparent mid-points attained by Lahiri. Characters are actors and acted upon just about the same. They do good and ill, what's loyal and what betrays, the honorable and the faithless in equal measure. They alternately evoke our sympathy and dismay, satisfaction and ... Read More

Rating:

- Lahiri shows her growth as a writer
Lahiri's stories are described as a slow burn. This is most evident in this collection. Each story seemingly plods on, but at the end of each one, the reader sees it all come together. I absolutely loved the final story, which was more like a novella. It perfectly described the joys and pitfalls of illicit romance. I felt as if this collection took on cultural identity in a more subtle way than Lahiri's two other books. The characters are all Bengali, but they are somehow also more American than the characters in 'Interpreter of Maladies' and 'The Namesake'. I don't know if this is a function of Lahiri growing as a writer or if it was done intentionally. Either way, she's done a bang up job.

Rating:

- I was sad to leave the characters
Unaccustomed Earth is a wonderful collection of stories that you are so sad to leave at the end of each one. A book that doesn't leave you. I am so happy that I found it.

Rating:

- An Unaccustomed Joy
When Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winning volume of short stories, "The Interpreter of Maladies" was published, I didn't read it. For one thing, I'd just read Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" and Rohinton Mistry's "Family Matters," and while I absolutely loved both books, I was suffering from a surfeit of Indian fiction, at least at that time. But more than that, I gave "The Interpreter of Maladies" a pass because of all the hype. I've been let down by hype in the past. More than once. Surely the book couldn't be that good, I told myself. Surely Lahiri's prose wasn't that sparkling and fresh.

When "Unaccustomed Earth," Lahiri's third book of longer short stories was released, I'd "sort of" decided to give it a pass as well. I have plenty to read and didn't really need anything new. However, I was shopping the other day and there was the book, lying on a table right in front of me. I couldn't ... Read More

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