http://instress.wordpress.com/unaccus... ( )

This title of this book is taken from a quotation by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It speaks of it being important for children to have new birthplaces; to "strike their roots into unaccustomed earth".

On the surface, Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories seems to be just that. Each story follows the lives of first and second generation Bengali-Americans. However, there are other threads throughout the stories. Most are about immigrants from privileged backgrounds, that come to live in well-to-do Boston and Cambridge areas. Their children go to very good schools and go on to have very good careers. They also have families and grandchildren. With all that comes life and all its various problems. The book becomes less about immigrants and more about typical upper middle class people. People who also hide a lot about themselves and don't communicate as much as they should.

Lahiri's writing is good, but most of her stories are very similar. It's hard to understand why so many stories about the same themes are needed in one collection. It's also a difficult book to relate to if you are too far removed from those who immigrated to America, aren't heterosexual, or not child-oriented. There are interesting ideas in the book, but after reading about privileged heterosexual after privileged heterosexual, it gets old. Most of the stories also end on a depressing note. I can't help feeling one just need go live in a wealthy suburb to understand Lahiri's work. ( )

Lahiri writes with a graceful simplicity of language and her narrative style is refreshingly uncomplicated. The themes of cross-cultural marriages, the issues faced by first- and second-generation immigrants in the West and, above all, familial and romantic relationships, should appeal to a wide variety of readers. ( )

I enjoyed this collection of 5 short stories about Bengali immigrants. The themes are of dislocation, loneliness and the occasional difficulties of family relationships. I found the writing very fluid, and the stories just a nice length. I look forward to reading more about this author. ( )

This is a collection of short stories: four or five stand-alones, and then three connected stories at the end that together are about novella-length.

On the whole, this is very familiar territory. Believe me, I wrote that sentence intending no pun whatsoever; the "unaccustomed earth" of the title is the immigrant's land, both a new world and the New World, and in Lahiri's case, it is invariably Boston and New England. Her immigrants arrive on the eastern seaboard from Calcutta, another coastal city, and they speak Bengali, and they become professors at Harvard and MIT. They are simply, evocatively depicted, the details of their lives lovingly and, in my limited experience of the same narrative, accurately rendered. Lahiri's style is always, always engaging, the simplicity of it turning from mundanity to devastation in a quiet sequence of sentences.

And each story is, alone, both lovely and deeply affecting - the title story gives us a young mother being visited by her father after some time apart, and how he plants her a garden; "Only Goodness" is an unflinching look at how easy it is to destroy a family; the linked Hema and Kaushik stories track a son's life after his mother dies young - but it's taken all together that they start to worry me. These familes, their stories, they have two things in common: they are immigrants from India, settling themselves down on that unaccustomed earth, and they are unhappy. Each story has that awful, echoing, hollow sense of loss, with time taken over the lines and caverns of that empty space, care taken to describe the ubiquity of that despair. Here is what worries me. Lahiri's protagonists marry in her stories, some in arranged marriages, some marrying white Americans, and all are loveless and unloved. Some lose their families to death and to distance, and there is no redemption for them, either. There is always a sense that something, somewhere, is irrepairably breaking. I ask not for the saccharine happy ending, but for the notion, however obliquely expressed, that there is hope for the Indian disaspora, that all is not lost at the moment of leaving - and this is not something I can find, here.

Perhaps it really is the author's opinion, that the immigrant experience is fundamentally a heartbreak, and in that case this is an honest book - but it is neither happy, nor hopeful, and I hope that it is not true. ( )