![]() ![]() ![]() Lahiri wrote Whereabouts in Italian and translated it herself as part of her European renaissance. But Lahiri is not done haunting me: two weeks after my debut, she released her third novel, Whereabouts. Coming first meant that hers became the way to write brown books, a fact that loomed over me while I was writing my novel, which makes its own attempt to say something about Indian America. (I did like The Namesake, which I read soon after.) Lahiri is a stylistically conservative writer whose revolution was one of timing: in the 2000s, she was among the first fiction writers to represent an emerging minority group, American desis, and to do so within the tradition of domestic realism. ![]() The stories were somber for my taste their descriptive, mannered prose and sensitive psychological realism depicted lonely immigrants and quietly disintegrating marriages. What I found in Maladies was not, in fact, radical self-recognition. ![]() It was a lot of pressure to place on both of us. (Never mind that most of those Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories take place in the U.S.) This was 2006, before the emergence of the bromide “representation matters,” but that was essentially the message: I was going to recognize myself in Lahiri. That year, Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 story collection The Interpreter of Maladies was replacing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart on our “World Literature”-themed syllabus. W hen I was in tenth grade, my favorite English teacher pulled me aside ceremoniously to deliver some news. ![]()
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