In her latest book, Jhumpa Lahiri has reverted to her strengths: stories with small canvases. In her first book her subjects were all first generation immigrants, struggling to find their feet in a foreign land. Ambitious young Indians with all their insecurities, trying to fit in a society that does not care a bit about them. A society they find difficult to assimilate into and actually are scared of.
Namesake was an ambitious project by Lahiri. She chose a very big canvas encompassing two generations of immigrants but restricted herself largely to this inter generational frictions without getting much into the outside real world in which the two generations are trying to survive.
Unaccustomed Earth is mostly about this second generation that we first observed in Namesake. Here we face the dilemma of those kids of Namesake who are now grownups. Its their story. Story of their struggle to find a place for themselves in a country they think as their own. How an entire generation of Indian immigrants are struggling to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable! Small battles that they fight daily within the family, and outside. Battles where a win is no better than a defeat. And this realization filling them with bitterness.
All these stories are essentially melancholic. These stories depicting small and big, significant and mundane human tragedies of routine nature are beset in a sad and depressing background. Lahiri ,as creator of these characters, is more mature here and more aloof of her subject matter. She , in my opinion, is for the first time in complete control of her characters; no sympathies for her, no frowning on him! No consolations anywhere.
It was not a very pleasant reading for me. Hated each and every details of the book and still ended up liking them all!
