Thursday, May. 08, 2008
Jhumpa Lahiri: The Quiet Laureate
By Lev Grossman
Among the things you will not find in Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction are: humor, suspense, cleverness, profound observations about life, vocabulary above the 10th-grade level, footnotes and typographical experiments. It is debatable whether her keyboard even has an exclamation point on it.
In person, Lahiri is almost as reserved as she is on the page. She is tall and slender and stands very straight, with a silk scarf tied around her neck, much too elegant for the chain coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she is being interviewed. Lahiri speaks quietly and deliberately, vouchsafing only the occasional smile. She orders nothing.
At 40, Lahiri is the most critically praised member of America's rising literary generation. Born in London to Bengali parents, she grew up in Rhode Island, where her father was (and is) a librarian. She went to Barnard, then moved to Boston to work in a bookstore and collect master's degrees and generally figure herself out. "I sometimes wonder, If I'd not gone up to Boston for those years, would I have written fiction?" she says. "In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers? I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response."
Now she's the one people are scared of. ("As long as my kids are afraid of me, that's all I really care about," she says. She has two with her husband, a journalist.) Her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. It was followed in 2003 by a novel, The Namesake, which was made into a movie by Mira Nair, and this year by another collection, Unaccustomed Earth, which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, an astounding feat for a book of quiet, formal short stories about the lives of Bengali immigrants and their children.
The success of Unaccustomed Earth is an anomalous data point, but it should tell us things about ourselves. Such as: we're way more interested in Bengali immigrants than we thought we were. Lahiri is a miniaturist, a microcosmologist, and she helps us understand what those lives mean without resorting to we-are-the-world multiculturalism. Everyone in Lahiri's fiction is pulled in at least six directions at once. Parents pull characters backward in time; children pull them forward. America pulls them west; India pulls them east. The need to marry pulls them outward; the need for solitude pulls them inward. Lahiri's stories are static, but what looks like stasis is really the stillness of enormous forces pushing in opposite directions, barely keeping one another in check. "Just being brought up by people who didn't and still don't feel fully here, fully present--that's very intense," she says. "It's not just all about the house we live in and the friends we have right here. There was always a whole other alternative universe to our lives."
Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status quo.
They are almost as different from one another as they are from their predecessors. Díaz, Lahiri's fellow Pulitzer winner, writes wild, slangy, funny prose laced with Dominican Spanish and Star Trek references. His determination to entertain is almost vaudevillian. Lahiri's stories are grave and quiet and slow, in the 19th century manner. They don't bribe you with humor or plot twists or flashy language; they extract a steep up-front investment of time from the reader before they return their hard, dense nuggets of truth. It's difficult to quote from her stories: they refuse to sum themselves up with a neat final epiphany, and Lahiri doesn't write one-liners. "I approach writing stories as a recorder," she says. "I think of my role as some kind of reporting device--recording and projecting." She steps back from the action, gets out of the way, so the people and things in her stories can exist the way real things do: richly, ambiguously, without explanation.
Her art and her life are marked by the same discipline. She doesn't read reviews. Her Pulitzer is still in its bubble wrap. When she writes, she likes to pretend that she never won the prize at all, that life is as simple as it was when she was writing Interpreter back in Boston. "I have to will my world, my life, back to that place, because that's where I find the freedom to write," she says. "If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day." It's as if to describe the world, she has to remove herself from it, keep her art and her life separate. Comfortable as she is crossing borders, she keeps that one tightly closed.
- Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/16/2008
这张照片很有内质美,有内在精神力。名字不好拼,估计得改改。
Let's see! - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/16/2008
I like her writings, very fluid, forward looking and full of simple but carefully chosen words. - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
You are always ahead of the pack too. ;)
鹿希 wrote:
I like her writings, very fluid, forward looking and full of simple but carefully chosen words. - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
I read her books" the name sake" and " interpreter of Maladies" last summer when I flew to China. "The interpreter of Maladies "are the better of the two. - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
Ah, you too. ;)
Caoye wrote:
I read her books" the name sake" and " interpreter of Maladies" last summer when I flew to China. "The interpreter of Maladies "are the better of the two. - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
嘿嘿,我好几年前就买了她的书,可是一直没有读,我算什么呀?那时就以为她是risen star呢,原来还在rising:)电影倒是一出来就看了的。 - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
Me too, I thought she is fading :-) 高峰期过了。
坦率地说,我没觉得她比 Amy Tan 更好。当然,Arm Tan 后来也不行。是用纯熟的英语写移民的故事,可英语本来就算她的母语。她的这些故事如果用中文写,也就是如此啊。
浮生 wrote:
嘿嘿,我好几年前就买了她的书,可是一直没有读,我算什么呀?那时就以为她是risen star呢,原来还在rising:)电影倒是一出来就看了的。 - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
touche wrote:
You are always ahead of the pack too. ;)
No, just by accident, I feel her writing speaks straight away to my heart.
sorry for 'a bowl of cold and sour (very sour) rice" :
http://www.mayacafe.com/forum/topic1sp.php3?tkey=1157677330 - Re: Jhumpa Lahiri: A rising literary starposted on 05/17/2008
July wrote:
Me too, I thought she is fading :-) 高峰期过了。
坦率地说,我没觉得她比 Amy Tan 更好。当然,Arm Tan 后来也不行。是用纯熟的英语写移民的故事,可英语本来就算她的母语。她的这些故事如果用中文写,也就是如此啊。
ya, you are probably right, but she is still very good, not a falling start yet. Personally speaking, I like Tan's story more her writing style, not as graceful as Lahiri's. - posted on 05/17/2008
我倒是觉得Lahiri和Amy Tan 没法比, 差不止一个档次. 去年Lahiri就给评为二十世纪美国最有影响力的二十位作家之一, 当然我的很多文学界朋友不同意, 我觉得那是摘不到葡萄嫌它酸. :-)
首先从感情的深度来讲, Lahiri的文字用情之深, 很少有人可比. 小说中所透露的painful longing has been haunting me ever since. 其次, Lahiri的短篇每篇都有一种quiet intelligence. 无论从emotional depth 还是intellect都非常draw readers in. Amy tan 装神弄鬼, 文字很外露.
既然标题把她定位为桂冠作家, 说明她早已过了rising 的时期, 应该是巅峰期了. 我还是觉得她的 The Interpreter of Maladies最好, 光是这个标题就让我嫉妒得要死, 这么好的标题, so much has been said and not said at the same time. 其实Lahiri本人不也就是一个The Interpreter of Maladies吗? 她的父母, 她父母的同代人, 还有她自己的所有疼痛, 都被她用文字阐释出来, 而且还不能一下子就label those pains. The Namesake也是一个好标题(电影一般, 小说还没读). 再想想The Joy luck club这么恶俗的标题, 小说主题的陈腐(特别符合美国人对中国人的想像. 两者的区别难道还不一目了然吗?
当然, 我也觉得Lahiri应该还不能跨入一个世纪最伟大的作家之列. 不过, 人们也需要新鲜血液啊. 老读那些白人大老爷们的作品, 再好也让人有些腻味. :-)
鹿希 wrote:
July wrote:ya, you are probably right, but she is still very good, not a falling start yet. Personally speaking, I like Tan's story more her writing style, not as graceful as Lahiri's.
Me too, I thought she is fading :-) 高峰期过了。
坦率地说,我没觉得她比 Amy Tan 更好。当然,Arm Tan 后来也不行。是用纯熟的英语写移民的故事,可英语本来就算她的母语。她的这些故事如果用中文写,也就是如此啊。 - posted on 05/17/2008
You are right.
Tan 和 Lahiri 其实很不同,就象中国人和印度人对美国的感受不同。Lahiri更加现代,她的感受更容易和我们这一代移民共鸣,但Tan的故事更加rough, 更加悲苦,是我们上一代的中国移民,非常不容易溶入这个社会,Lahiri 的移民还是溶入了美国。Tan 写的其实是中国人在美国的故事。
Tan的语言很match她的故事,她的人物。我一直认为小说的语言不要太elegant,太流畅,但要生动。
鹿希 wrote:
July wrote:ya, you are probably right, but she is still very good, not a falling start yet. Personally speaking, I like Tan's story more her writing style, not as graceful as Lahiri's.
Me too, I thought she is fading :-) 高峰期过了。
坦率地说,我没觉得她比 Amy Tan 更好。当然,Arm Tan 后来也不行。是用纯熟的英语写移民的故事,可英语本来就算她的母语。她的这些故事如果用中文写,也就是如此啊。
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