When a story book it is done with Pulitzer Prize for works of fiction (it is normal that it is awarded to novels), without a doubt it is because it is an exceptional volume that in the corresponding year ousts a multitude of writers longing for the award for their well-worked novels.
That's what happened to Jhumpa Lahiri in the year 2000. At thirty-three years old, this young woman, a paradigm of multiculturalism, trained in literature and full of experiences from here and there, achieved one of the greatest successes in American literature with her book of stories initially called "Interpreter of emotions."
Since then Lahiri is not that he has lavished on a very extensive own bibliography, but he has continued to publish great fiction books widely supported by critics and by some readers eager for that point between exotic and cultivator of a narrator focused on his perspective of the world as an eternal migrant. From its Indian origins that he preserves in each of his books to the whole world ...
Top 3 Recommended Books by Jhumpa Lahiri
The interpreter of pain
The curiosity for the overwhelming recognition of this book of stories is soon satisfied. You are immediately led inexorably through its pages from the first paragraph. And this most recent edition is an unavoidable invitation to get closer to this narrator of emigration who conquered millions of readers in the United States first and in the rest of the world later.
The book is made up of nine stories that serve a very concentrated narrative intent, however. The same feeling of uprooting, which emerges from all those displaced by their own will or by the imposition of circumstances, can appear from loneliness, and for that we do not have to have traveled so many kilometers from that place recognized by our memory as home.
The most important part of the book is a magical current that ends up turning those characters from far away countries into the reader himself, regardless of origin. The introspection of the human being when the circumstances are adverse are connected with the same intention to heal the defeat.
And although the book goes into profuse detail about the disparities between some cultures and others, the idea of ​​the foreign as a purely semantic root from the etymologically strange, ends up approaching a reader who discovers that, foreign to himself and in need of humanity in the neighbor.
The good name
Jhumpa's first novel had that stigmatization, that prejudice on the narrative capacity of the extensive in an author of whom only a book of stories was known so powerful as to get hold of the Pulitzer.
But the truth is that in this novel Jhumpa again surprised with an argument that already seemed to hang over her as exclusive, multiculturalism, the integration from Bengali culture to America but made extensible to any other process of social miscegenation.
With an aspect of generational narration that also served to atomize the story by way of composition of stories, we meet the Ganguli family, some parents completely respectful of their origins and some children Gogol and Sonia who live in that no man's land, the most similar to a ghetto in which you can be locked up according to your choices ...
Unusual land
One of Jhumpa's greatest achievements is his move from the particular to the global. The overwhelming triumph of a narrator specialized in telling stories of characters brought from her imaginary reconstructed from her Hindu ancestry cannot be understood in any other way.
The brutal success of this book throughout the United States for many years is based on this harmony of souls that, although they compose their experiences and their subjective world based on their beliefs, in the end they only make the idea of ​​the individual outlining above all else.
In this book we find unlabeled characters, stripped of their very presentation as immigrants. And the reader simply enjoys discovering that multiculturalism is not a problem but perhaps a solution to have more perspectives with which to undertake a world that can never be approached from a single idea without ending up colliding with the most frustrating deficiencies.
Other recommended books by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nerina's notebook
The encounter with the characters is, surely, the greatest intimacy of the act of writing. Revealing it is offering a hand to the reader to accompany them in that strange solitude where people are sought and spaces are created. Just what happens in this story of metaliterature and life.
At the bottom of a desk drawer in her house in Rome, the author finds some objects forgotten by their former owners: postage stamps, a Greek-Italian dictionary, buttons, postcards that were never sent, a photo of three standing women in front of a window, and a fuchsia notebook with the name "Nerina" handwritten on the cover.
Who is that woman without a last name? Like a classical or medieval poet, or a mysterious Renaissance artist, Nerina escapes history and geography. Stateless, polyglot, cultured, she writes poems about her life between Rome, London, Calcutta and Boston, her connection with the sea, her relationship with her family and with words, and in her notebook of exceptional and everyday poems Jhumpa Lahiri glimpses an identity.
Between her and Nerina, whose entire existence is entrusted to verses and very few other clues, there is the same relationship that unites certain modern poets with their doubles, who sometimes pretend to be other authors, comment on poems that they pretend not to have written or, more often, they appear to be simple readers. The writer becomes a reader and even invokes the intervention of a mysterious third person: a scholar who helps her organize that ball of stanzas and lives that are not hers, but that could be ours and that, through her notes, , weaves a second book that, like Narcissus in the myth, does not recognize itself in its own reflection.
roman tales
Any home in its many variations forms the most essential core. And that is where the initial social but also spiritual structure of our world is formed. A kind of limbo where everyone waits for their moment to go out there again in search of her flashes of glory. To know these characters is to observe them from that interiority where everything is generated.
A family enjoys their holidays in a Roman country house while the daughter of the caretakers - a couple with an ancient affront - takes care of the housework and discreetly watches her; a joyous reunion of two friends reveals, however, irreconcilable differences; a mature writer becomes obsessed with a woman he only meets at a mutual friend's parties; a family harassed by their neighbors is forced to leave their home; a couple seek solace in Rome to try to forget their personal tragedy.
With these "stories written in a state of grace" (Roberto Carnero, Avvenire), the author of The Interpreter of Pain and Unaccustomed Land returns to the genre that made her world famous. Story after story, Jhumpa Lahiri surprises and moves us with a dazzling book about love, uprooting, loneliness and the natural rhythms of a city that welcomes everyone equally.
