Initial Impressions

[Sadia Latifi]

How come nobody is awake right now? This is irritating to me. I'm day-night reverse again.

I read the first story, "Unaccustomed Earth." Typical Lahiri storytelling. A tight, 50-page package with a pretty silk bow wrapped over it.

Maybe I'm projecting (read: I am), but I really want her to shake things up. I don't know how many more cute immigrant stories I can take. It could be the trajectory of my own life I'm yearning to read about, but enough with the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with every closing line. I would like to be shocked. That may be an unfair request of someone as delicate as Jhumpa, but we'll see. In all fairness- I guess she has the ability to do that, recalling specific plot twists in The Namesake, but I can't recall feeling the same emotional rollercoaster with her short stories the first time around.


S

[Leora Falk]

Argh. Someone let me know when they have read further. I want to comment on the other stories -- specifically the package of the last three and Hell-Heaven, but I don't want to mess other people up. 

-Leora

--
Leora Falk
617 335 3406 (cell)
leora...@gmail.com

[Sadia Latifi]

No, please go ahead - I've gotten through the first part and figure I'll finish the rest tonight. "Only Goodness" through me for sort of a loop. I liked the material, but I definitely felt like she was out of her comfort zone.

--
Sadia Latifi
sadia....@gmail.com
703.475.3308

[Leora Falk]

I was initially disappointed by Hell-Heaven.

 Reading it, I felt as though Lahiri had dropped her trademark subtlety. The pervading theme of the tensions between the old and new, were laid to bare and obvious: conveyed through her plot points rather than her turns in language. 

But -- as i read walking home from the metro-- the final pages literally stopped me in my tracks. It was as if her tricks of displaying the tensions within one sentence had been drawn out to the whole story. The end made the lack of subtlety in the rest of the story justified, in that it allowed the reader to sit back, lured into a sense of false security. But I think that hte last pages or so of Hell-Heaven could, in a way, stand asa mini story in and of itself. It felt a bit as though she was writing to get to those pages, and I wish that she could have gone back and put the gentleness with which she writes  even the most horrific into the more mundane lead-up to the end of that story. 

It's interesting that you thought that Only Goodness was out of her comfort zone, because although the topic was a little off of her standard fare, it seemed to me that she created a more consistent and compelling story there than she had in Hell-Heaven. 

Sadia, or anyone else, why'd you think she was  out of her zone?

Also, did anyone else get that nasty sense of de ja vu, having read a story or two here when they were originally published in The New Yorker? 

~Leora