With apologies to The Namesake
2006
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p>On a wet August monsoon evening two weeks before her due date, Jennifer Ninnington stands in the kitchen of a Pali Hill apartment, combining Bournvita and Horlicks and crumbled chocolate in a bowl. She adds sugar, flour, egg whites, wishing there were yeast to pour into the mix. Jennifer has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the brownies sold for two bucks in New York cafés and at large train stations throughout America, spilling from saran wrap. She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her denim shirt. Her swollen feet ache against speckled white marble. She reaches for another chocolate bar, frowning again as she pulls at its crisp gold wrapper. A curious warmth floods her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe she doubles over, gasping without sound, dropping the chocolate bar with a thud on the floor.
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p>She calls out to her husband, Andy, an MBA candidate at IIM-Bombay, who is studying in the bedroom. He leans over a card table; the edge of their bed, a queen mattress under a pastel blue pinstriped twill spread, serves as his chair.
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p>At dawn a taxi is called to ferry them through deserted Pali Hill streets, past the Bandra railway station and down Linking Road, to Lilavati Hospital. She is asked to remove her Banana Republic denim shirt and khakis in favor of a plain white gown that, to her mild embarrassment, makes her look fat. A nurse offers to fold up the denim shirt and khakis but, exasperated by the no-wrinkle denim, ends up stuffing the material into Jennifer’s Wal-Mart suitcase. Her obstetrician, Dr. Jamshedpur, gauntly handsome in a George Clooney sort of way, with fine slate-colored hair swept back from his temples, arrives to examine her progress. She searches for Andy’s face, but he has stepped behind the curtain the doctor has drawn. “I’ll be back,” Andy says to her in English, and then a nurse adds: “Don’t you worry, Mr. Ninnington.”
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p>Now she is alone, cut off by curtains from the three other women in the room. One woman’s name, she gathers from bits of conversation, is Balvinder. Another is Leela. Kunti lies to her left. “Hai rabba, hai rabba,” she hears one of them say. And then a man’s voice: “Jai mata di.” She wishes the curtains were open, so that she could talk to the Indian women. Perhaps one of them has given birth before, can tell her what to expect. But she has gathered that Bombayites, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and sitting in obscene postures on the Lands End rocks, prefer their privacy.
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p>She wonders if she is the only American person in the hospital, but a gentle twitch from the baby reminds her that she is, technically speaking, not alone. In America, she thinks to herself, women go to an HMO to give birth.
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p>She has been instructed to time the duration of the contractions and so she consults her watch, a bon voyage gift from her parents, slipped over her wrist the last time she saw them, amid airport confusion and tears. It wasn’t until she was on the plane, flying for the first time in her life on a Boeing 777 whose quiet ascent four members of her family had watched from the gate at JFK Airport, as she was drifting over parts of America she’d never set foot in, and then even farther, outside America itself, that she’d noticed the watch among the cavalcade of cheap electronics on her arms: Timex, Casio, Fossil.
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p>Indian seconds tick on top of her pulse point. She calculates the American time on her fingers. It is nine and a half hours behind in New York, still morning, seven o’clock. In the kitchen of her parents’ flat on W. 82nd St., at this very moment, her sister is pouring morning cocktails into cut glass tumblers, arranging toast on a tray. Her mother, very soon to be a grandmother, is standing at the mirror of her dressing table, fluffing a silver perm with her fingers. Her father hunches over his glass table by the window, building model ships, watching the History Channel. Her younger brother, Mike, plays Xbox on the bed. For an instant the weight of the baby vanishes, replaced by the scene that passes before her eyes, only to be replaced once more by a brown strip of Mahim Bay, thick green treetops, autorickshaws gliding up and down the Western Express Highway.
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p>In Bandra it is four thirty in the afternoon, still lunchtime in the hospital’s relaxed day. A tray holding warm Frooti, kheer, masala chai, and cold dal chawal is brought to her side. Antonia Gonzalves, the friendly nurse with the diamond engagement ring and a fringe of henna’d hair beneath her cap, tells Jennifer to consume only the Frooti and the masala chai. It’s just as well. Jennifer would not have touched the dal chawal, even if permitted; Indians eat their dal chawal with their hands, though Jennifer has recently found a kind retailer on Lamonton Road willing to sell her a cutlery set.
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p>Nothing feels normal to Jennifer. For the past eighteen months, ever since she’s arrived in Pali Hill, nothing has felt normal at all: motherhood in a foreign land. She is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so teeming and overflowing.
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p>”How about a little walk? It might do you good,” Antonia asks when she comes to clear the lunch tray. Jennifer looks up from a tattered copy of the New Yorker magazine that she’d brought to read on her plane ride to Bombay and still cannot bring herself to throw away. The printed pages of English type, smooth to the touch, are a perpetual comfort to her. She’s read each of the short stories and poems and articles a dozen times, a view of the Upper West Side skyline sketched one snowy February morning.
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p>”Yes, all right,” Jennifer says. After a minute they continue on, toward the nurses’ station. “Hoping for a boy or a girl?” Antonia asks.
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p>”As long as there are dus ungali,” Jennifer replies. Antonia smiles, a little too widely, and suddenly Jennifer realizes her error, knows she should have said “dus ungaliyan.” This error pains her almost as much as her last contraction. Hindi had been her subject. In New York, before she was married, she was working toward a college degree. She used to tutor neighborhood schoolchildren in their homes, in their duplexes and coops, helping them to memorize Tagore and Narayan, to pronounce words like kshatriya and kshitij, to understand the difference between Maoists and Naxalites, between the CPI, the CPI(M) and the DIC(K). But in English, to say “fingers” only takes one additional letter.
Andy was born twice in America, and then a third time, in India. He does not thank God; he openly reveres Deepak Chopra. Instead of thanking God he thanks Nabokov, the Russian writer who had saved his life, when Antonia enters the waiting room.
wow that was v clever and witty.loved it. but…
wat r u doin typing stuf like that up in bombay tho, that’s meant for quieter places of the world where the cities actually stop!
for all those who can’t be there you need to either do one or all of the following:
-go to Naturals ice cream in Bandra -try out that awesome place i went to last time, can’t remember the name but its a restaurant in Bandra that only serves entrees -go to the movies and have that mango/vanilla ice cream during intermission -go to Juhu beach and do something crazy -take more pics
some of us are living vicariously through your holiday, this is an order to go have more fun
This reminds me more of Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust than the Namesake. Well written either way.
It’s a search ‘n replace of ‘The Namesake.’ The prose is almost entirely Lahiri’s.
I know, I meant “well done” with the replacements. I was reminded of Heat and Dust because of the lonliness and disenchantment of the Western woman living in India.
Indians eat their dal chawal with their hands
And its some sight!
Speaking of eating with hands, I once saw this documentary about Kerala on the Travel Channel. They showed this gathering where people were eating in a communal setting. They had rice and some spices neatly laid out on a coconut leaf. Then this one gentlemen walked around with a bucket of daal and once he poured out the daal, all hell broke loose. The eaters started making little soccer balls of the rice and daal with their hands and started popping them into their mouths. It was quite a scene. If the daal would drip down their hands onto to their arm, they would expertly lick it from the bottom to the top. Now some people might get grossed out, but I kinda loved it. I think I am going to go down to Kerala, next time I go to India and crash a wedding or a party. Kerala btw is stunningly beautiful.
Hahahaha – Manish, I lowed it!
AMfD – was it a banana leaf? Hey if you think the daal chawal is a sight, you should see us attack “pudding” – rice, yogurt, sugar and banana! 🙂
There is no IIM in Bombay. There is a IIT, but no IIM. And its called IIT – Powai not IIT – Bombay. Sheesh…. Wait, this is fiction… nevermind then.
Btw – You need to visit a IIT campus on your trip and and observe the species in their natural habitat.
Regarding eating with hands:
Eating a meal off a banana leaf is an art. There are those that do it well and then there are those who are sloppy and less-cultured. I was taught to eat from a banana leaf elegantly with the tips of my fingers. One has to make sure the liquids — sambhar, rasam etc does not “run-off” the leaf. Usually a depression is created in the mound of rice and the liquid poured into it and sophisticated people eat it mixing the rice and sambhar. Even payasam is delicately eaten dipping your fingers in the sweet concotion of milk sugar cardamom.
Just as the world is realizing that draping an unstitched cloth of 6 yards of material is a more evolved and graceful way of dressing, people will become aware that there is an elegance to eating with ones fingers. If you feel otherwise maybe you need to get rid of your Euro-centric bias.
Oh, it’s a search and replace? I’m just a little let down.
Cos I was so excited and staggered by how good your impression of Jhumpa Lumpa was. It was hilarious to start with, then it got uncanny, like “wow, I can’t believe how good this dude is at getting to the empty heart of her prose.”
She truly is a terrible writer, with these godawful descriptive ticks: “She has been instructed to time the duration of the contractions and so she consults her watch, a bon voyage gift from her parents, slipped over her wrist the last time she saw them, amid airport confusion and tears.”
Pure Jhumpa, pure dreck. Going through the motions, describing everything in sight and its origins, as in a desperate attempt to pad an MFA thesis. It’s comical when you compare her to someone like Coetzee who just gets the boot stuck in, no fuss no muss. Just go and read the opening pages of “The Life and Times of Michael K.” to see what I mean.
(I’m sorry to be so hard on her, but honestly, can’t people see how turgid and unbearable her Banana Republican brand-fetishistic arriviste class-marker act is? When’s the Pulitzer Prize winner going to get an editor?)
::She truly is a terrible writer::
Amen my brother!
posts #6,9
I heard a friend once tell me that eating rasam off banana leaf is called Indian fastfood 🙂
After reading the associated links and the comments, I now understand that this was meant to be a parody of Lahiri’s writing. However, I remain baffled as to why/how it becomes a parody when you reverse the cultural circumstances. (I guess having to ask incriminates me as white and born American, and I confess, I am both.) The thing is, that before I knew what you were doing — I did recognize occasional echoes from The Namesake but it has been long enough since I read it that I had lost the details — so I actually thought it was a real piece and wanted more!
To me, inserting another woman into another culture into Lahiri’s prose, and actually drawing me in, making me want more, is a tribute rather than a parody, that perhaps she described something universal in her very specific story. But then again, maybe I am just an easy reader. Or maybe you meant to do that? I kind of think not.
Guess it shows how the value of literature varies according to the sensitivities and tastes of the readers, as does the value of parody.
What is terrible about this sentence you have quoted? What does ‘descriptive ticks’ mean?
Is description ‘going through the motions’? Then all writing is going through the motions, isnt it? In fact that to me seems to be a good description of the act and art of writing : going through the motions. And yet you think it is a criticism of her writing.
You further speculate that her ‘going through the motions’ is an act of desperation, in order to pad the novel, as if it is extraneous to the novel. But novels are capacious. One of the tools of rhetoric of a novelist is the gift of stopping still, describing, investigating a world.
This is perplexing – because she does not write like Coetzee, her work is comical to read? It does not make sense. So you are setting Coetzee, who writes in the wake of Beckett, by subtraction, by depletion, as the standard by which all novelists must be judged, to be found comical and wanting should they not imitate him?
Turgid
Excessively ornate or complex in style or language; grandiloquent: turgid prose. Swollen or distended, as from a fluid; bloated: a turgid bladder; turgid veins
I cannot think of a more innacurate description of her writing. At the very basic level, you could describe her prose as polished, clear, but certainly not excessively ornate. And you seem to be criticising her on the basis of some class offence describing her (or her writing? It is not easy to separate your criticisms of them) in a political and moral sense. Is it her personally you despise, and are having trouble separating your image or how she has offended against your sensibility, from her work? The Namesake, after all, is all about a man who feels ill at ease in all the social settings he arrives in – the ‘brand fetishism’ becomes a description of Gogol’s self-orientation in the dazzling upper middle class milieu he drifts into.
I am sure she has an editor. This is a churlish and badly thought through spleen against Lahiri.
She does have a point with the brand-fetishism, I think. You’re an immigrant and either embracing the solace of “glamorous” foreign brands you had only heard of before, or, you’re psychologically adrift and buying and noting these items (whether glamorous or mundane) is a first attempt at putting down roots.
Lo,
You’re right: I was unduly splenetic. Unkind, even.
But I’m also right: Jhumpa is not a good writer. She’s much celebrated, no doubt, but I can’t stand to read her. Not because she’s not Beckett, or Coetzee, but because she’s not soulful. Nabokov is not spare, but he’s not banal. She is.
I do agree with you, Lo, when you say one of the tools of rhetoric of a novelist is the gift of stopping still, describing, investigating a world. Whether or not Jhumpa Lahiri is a great practitioner of that art is a subject, I see, on which we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Not getting into the writing debate…
The first time I went to India….a man on the plane sitting next to me gave me a hard time for eating with my left hand…with a fork…I said, I am left handed…..he said he was too but ate with right hand, and I should too….so later on, there I was in some restaurant in Bangalore, masala orange stuff running down my arm, rice stuck to my face…while my Indian pal ate neatly, tidily (Is that a word, it is now) just his fingertips stained orange….I needed a bath afterwards!
Now, in Indian restaurants in the US, I like to show off my eating with right hand and no utensils talent, which always has the Indian patrons and waitress looking at me rather impressed…:P…..and yes, I am proud, I can eat daal chawal off of a banana leaf with my right hand and well almost not spill a drop…..I dont yet wear white to Indian restaurants either!
About Heat and Dust….snore snore…….I did like the book better….
::”She has been instructed to time the duration of the contractions and so she consults her watch, a bon voyage gift from her parents, slipped over her wrist the last time she saw them, amid airport confusion and tears.”::
Dolores –
I read the above sentence and it seems contrived – more a shot at the artistic by a romance writer than the refined descriptions of a pro. In the above instance, her attempt to convey past events w/in the simple act of checking time makes the sentence unwieldly and disingenuous. I think the attempt can be commended, but it is poorly executed and could be better – that is, if written by a better writer.
If the romance writer comment rankles, here is a line (one of several) right out of your bible to back up the point: ::Her obstertician, Dr. Ashley, gauntly handsome in a Lord Mountbatten sort of way, with fine sand-colored hair swept back from his temples, arrives to examine her progress.:: Please.
And please don’t think this is some personal attack on Lahiri. I know nothing about her. Reading the first page of Namesake was enough for me to definitively set both her and her book permanently out of my mind.
::When’s the Pulitzer Prize winner going to get an editor?::
Pulitzer-schmulitzer. I would put my backing on the list of Booker Prize winners – I have yet to read an author from that list who disappoints.
Oh god, you pretentious English-lit types are at it again! So what’s wrong with being descriptive?
I guess Indians are all supposed to think Rushdiesqe ways. The “Indians don’t have a real sense of time” and “Indian mind thinks in wierd ways which is why MC so reflects the real India” – and that kinda stuff which I heard in my college fiction class.
Somehow, after Rushdie, it is so wrong for an Indian writer to actually write a simple, heartfelt story anymore, where people just think straight, and things just happen in a normal, chronological order.
Part of why this appealed to me may be because: 1) Indian English does tend to be a little more loquacious and “ornate” as compared to the short, minimalist American style. 2) It does simulate pretty well, the occasional rush of homesickness that one might feel shortly after moving to a different country, with chaotic free association of thoughts.
Sorry, you have not said a single thing here except what ‘seems’. What does yanking a sentence out of a novel and then saying that it ‘seems contrived’ mean? From that single sentence you construct a theory of the writer as a ‘romantic novelist’? Your criticism is meaningless, you have added nothing to back up your claims.
This is criticism?
She does not ‘attempt to convey past events’ – she actually describes something that has happened in the past. No attempt – she actually does it. As for how it makes the sentence ‘unwieldy and disingenuous’ – this is a fatuity. What is ‘disingenuous’ about this sentence? What about it is insincere? That she refers to a past event as she recalls going into labour? That is insincere? That a woman about to give birth thinks about the ones she loves? That is disingenuity to you? You are being utterly obtuse.
Whatever the reason is, your criticism is poor. You use words without thinking of their meaning, describing her prose as ‘turgid’ – which with its smooth plains and simplicity it simply is not, and then ramble on about a sentence being ‘disingenuous’ and ‘contrived’ because of some convoluted criteria of ‘attepting to convey by something or something or the other’. Sorry – those two words sum up your criticism quite aptly more than they do Lahiri’s writing.
Hey Manish– nice version of going into labor, Jhumpa or no Jhumpa. Morning cocktails I can live with, but you do know that grandmothers already don’t wear their hair grey in the West 80’s these days and also not in Mumbai whenever possible– and wot’s that you’re saying about a “gentle twitch” from the baby? Was that straight out of Jhumpa — in which case, may the pantheon be with her when it happens for real. Mala’s right– it’s fingers, not hands, and haven’t y’all seen people eating funny with knives and forks and spoons right here?
I dont think IIM has a Bombay campus, Manish.
Wa, Manish, Wa! You are hilarious! I throw flowers and chocolate coins at you!
Well, I don’t worry too much about whether the writers I like are lauded, popular, or anything in between. I like liking what I like. Yeah, I wrote that and I stand by it 🙂
Anyway, with apologies to the Lahiri fans on this thread (and I love simplicity and minimalism), Lahiri is no Hemingway…..I think it’s the passivity of it all. The language, the emotion, the action, the motion. All of it. But when it comes to prose and novels and words, well, it’s personal. I just wish the types of novels that win prizes didn’t seem so samey these days. KnowwhatImean?
Okay, I’ve been re-reading the fan posts and trying to figure out why her prose doesn’t do anything for me when I read Anita Brookner for heaven’s sake! I think the best point made by the fans is that she is describing a sense of displacement and dislocation – I give you that. But it seems, well, well, well, what? You know what I think it is? Anyone of us could have written that. Come on – is it so hard? Just describe careful, work, and rework it. But I can’t imagine writing Madame Bovary. Am I way off base here and being unfair?
O Lo-
Nabokov to Lahiri is no obvious jump to me! I appreciate your enthusiasm (w/ just a hint of aggression?)but can’t pretend to understand it.
Sentences probably never appear unwieldly to you, and since explanations are often futile, perhaps an example of a superb one: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Well-written sentences often (particularly if read aloud) reveal a certain tempo, much like you would expect to find in poetry but can also find in well-written literature. Words are carefully chosen not just for their meaning and the images they invoke but for the rhythm they add to the sentence and the way in which they complement other words. Nabokov did this well and did this consistently. Lahiri didn’t do this at all. At least not on her first page. You might have to tell me of the remaining 200 something pages becuz I refuse to read it. Instead she rams a grocery list of activities into her paragraphs and throws a few chilies around to keep it real.
And yes, in the end, lit. always comes down to what it seems like to the individual. No English class I’ve ever heard of has been about right or wrong – this is what makes English lit. majors such undesirables – they never really do have a straight answer for you do they? And at the end of the day, neither of us needs to understand the other’s approval or criticism – certainly, there is a market for diverse opinions in literature – there has to be, most books published today wouldn’t fly of the shelf as they actually do otherwise.
Ajk, you’re on point.
You, too, MD.
For the tone deaf, may I recommend poetry? Agha Shahid Ali is as good a place to start as any. Those rhythms get internalised by the best prose writers, who master the act of writing poetry without “writing poetry.”
Salaam, y’all.
i think its a little bit unfair to call lahiri a TERRIBLE writer, she does work much better in the short story form although ‘the namesake’ was pretty unremarkable.
i think what the piece shows (and why so many indians find her average) is that lahiri’s success sort of comes from ‘timing’. she’s writing at a time when indian literature is crash-hot and indians living overseas like us, as well as other people, just wanna get their hands on whatever they can find really.
i mean really many indians living overseas who consider themselves writers could capture a similar sense of dislocation etc. (maybe not so much as in her short fiction, but definitely the novel)… she just got in first.
its kinda of like Deepak Chopra. Any random Indian guy sitting down the side of the road could tell you all that enlightenment shit for free because that stuff is so common to us and our culture. Chopra just got v clever and decided to capture a western market’s search for spirituality and repackage stuff to make it pretty.
she does try v. hard, though. and the whole gogol/nikhil thing is pretty clever…come on people where’s the love? She’s nice and young and pretty. She aint that bad.
tashi-
I absolutely agree w/r/t your point about timing – it’s a greasy, backdoor sorta way to get your face on magazines, but it works – at least in the short-run. A lotta things work in the short-run. A lotta things also suck.
My god, that’s funny 😀
Well, maybe. But none of us did. So she gets the credit and the cash 🙂 Life’s unfair, no?
On a logical level, I do see what the Jhumpa critics are trying to say. However, the book appealed to me so strongly on an emotional and personal level (there were so many moments when I’d read something about some thought that a character had and go ‘That’s me!’) that any literary criticism that I could possible make seemed contrived.
You might take lessons in painting and produce work following all the rules of design, but it is not ‘art’ without that extra ‘soul’. Sometimes something just works for an audience; that is the ultimate judgement of a piece of art, and no armies of wise critics can hope to contest that.
Christ, not again!!
Why y’all got to hate on Lahiri so much?
(to paraphrase) “Why do white people only care about kama-sutra-yoga-bindi?” “What about our real lives?” “Lahiri is boring- she writes what any of us could have written!” “She’s capitalizing on what white people want!!”
Bahh.. will nothing please you?
See here and further down the thread for my defence.
If y’all really want to hate, pick on a better target, yeah? Can we talk about that ‘How Opal Mehta Got A Life’ Harvard, half-a-mil, chick-lit desi girl yet??
Oh Lord, I didn’t mean that ‘anyone could have written it’ as sour grapes. Good for Lahiri for writing it, for touching people with her writing, and making a buck. I just don’t like it, myself, but, whatever. And if you do, fine. I find a lot of stuff turgid these days, from Ian Atonement what’shisname to Lahiri to all that David Sedaris jazz. It’s not desi or Lahiri specific. Even ‘the time will tell’ verdict isn’t a verdict as writers are continually ‘lost’ and discovered, again, and again, and again. My favorite rediscovered author, for the moment, is Nina Berberova. Now that’s some ‘Russian immigrant in Paris between the wars’ fiction. It’s brutal. I want vivid, brutal, suffocating, living, alive, dead, prose. I want it all. This? Not. For. Me.
Desi-readers: what Indian writers, writing in English ’cause I’m illiterate in everything else, would you suggest? That is vivid, brutal, suffocating, living, alive, dead, prose?
Oh, cicatrix, I remember your defense. Funny, I hate bombast and I love the short, sharp, shocked in writing. But I think the Nabokov excerpt above is the kind of minimalism I’m talking about. When it’s stripped bare, I want to see the white of the bones.
MD and cicatrix:
-yes, i agree that Lahiri has been bashed WAY too much. I mean her success does come from timing but anyone who’s read ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ cannot help but bow down to her. That kind of writing is pure talent distilled.
-Although I said ‘The Namesake’ is unremarkable, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good. I read it and studied it and most people I know who’ve read it liked it. It just wasn’t out of this world. And v true about Opal Mehta et al look at ‘the spices speak to me’ post for more debate about turning complex cultural issues into a pg-rated movie where everyone gets to laugh at the weird ethnic families and their crazy ways
-Read (although I know these names are a bit obvious)
-early Rushdie fiction and later non-fiction (so stay away from late fiction) -anything by Rohinton Mistry -Hari Kunzru esp. ‘Transmission’ -Amitav Ghosh – ‘The Hungry Tide’ and others -Bharati Mukherjee -Annamarie Jagose (but she might be hard to find as she is an Indian-NZer) -Vikram Seth (but not ‘Golden Gate’, its a novel in verse and if those cutesy rhymes at the beginning of ‘A Suitable Boy’ kinda amused you, wait till you try to chug through hundreds of them) -Monica Ali – ‘Brick Lane’
-ps maybe a reason Lahiri is bashed so much is that we often expect amazing things from ‘our own’? There are many, many worse writers out there churnin out shite but because Lahiri writes within a western market its almost as if we want to shine our shoes and put on our best dress every time we publish something because non-indians are going to read it as well. it’s like the chick who’s afraid of getting a zit before she goes the prom ‘cos otherwise she won’t get laid.
-even though i’m not a big fan of ‘opal mehta’ type indian chick lit myself, in a strange way its nice to see us being a bit easier on ourselves. i don’t really care if ‘The Namesake’ wasn’t the best book ever by an Indian, the fact that so many people recognised its opening passage shows that Lahiri is a compelling writer. And her quiet, mellow style is a refreshing balance to the much-loved elaborate literary acrobatics of others.
Woah! The metaphor that crashed to earth…
🙂
::maybe a reason Lahiri is bashed so much is that we often expect amazing things from ‘our own’?::
Not to belabour the point (well, maybe we’re way past that), but that’s really not my reason whatsoever. In fact, I generally shy away from expecting anything in particular (either excellence or otherwise) from brown people simply based on the fact that they are brown – what an extraordinary expectation that would be!
But, when Lahiri has a Pulitzer to her name I certainly can point out that – hm, she really doesn’t live up to the expectations that come along w/ winning a Pulitzer. Now, that naturally leads to the Q what a Pulitzer award stands for these days , but that’s a whole separate argument we don’t need to get into.
Now, if you want to argue that, as a general rule, we should be as accepting of our mediocre authors (brown or otherwise) as our exceptional ones, then, at the end of the day, you and I should agree to disagree.
it’s like the chick who’s afraid of getting a zit before she goes the prom ‘cos otherwise she won’t get laid.
haha – awesome gotta love teen angst
Cicatrix,
Did you read “Opal Mehta”? Would love to hear your thoughts.
P.