Uttara Choudhury

New York: Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book The Unaccoustomed Earth has pushed her back onto the bestseller lists and she is getting a whole lot of attention and praise that she’s still not quite sure what to do with.

In the latest crush of publicity, a pit stop at the famous Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, Lahiri’s fans queued up for hours to get a signed copy of her book.

The author, known to be reclusive, appeared on Wednesday night at her favourite bookstore to do something that makes her squirm: Read her own work, specifically excerpts from her third book Unaccoustomed Earth, the much-anticipated follow-up to her novel, The Namesake and the Interpreter of Maladies which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000.

“I can’t thank this store enough for just existing,” said Lahiri recalling that as grads she and a friend perennially browsed the Strand.

“The $5 or $10 in our pockets just went so far but at night we would pore over our treasures.”

A lot has changed for Lahiri now 40 since she last visited the Strand with chump change in her pocket.

Robin Dresser, Lahiri’s editor at Knoph, who was present at the reading, reportedly signed her on in a two-book deal worth at least $1 million.

“Readers can read their family stories into her family stories,” said Dresser. Lahiri says her writing career was unexpected.

“I really didn’t think I would be a writer. I went through the first half of my life doing other things including teaching at the University. It took me the first 30 years of my life to publish anything,” says the Brownstone Brooklyn novelist made good.

Unaccoustomed Earth is once again about upwardly mobile Indian immigrants. The set of eight mature stories take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand. Lahiri’s stories about Bengalis living in America deal with immigration, death, and estrangement and are shot with insights about India.

Her editor admits to breaking down in the office while going over the book.

Do immigrant tales have to be tinged with a Chekhovian sense of loss? Lahiri says; “It always implies a leaving behind and therefore a loss. There is inherently an elegiac passage that people undertake in coming to a new world. I write a lot about families, and characters that come from that background. I have never really experienced what it is like to be an immigrant because I have lived all my life between Boston and the New York area. I know very little of the life that my parents from Calcutta and their friends have lived. But what I do know is that there is a great loss,” says Lahiri.

“I feel a sad every time I have to leave an apartment and move from one neighbourhood to another because that was my home; to put it all away in a box and onto a truck and move away… I have always felt it very deeply. Along with a lot of joyful, positive experiences accompanying such journeys there is a pang. For people like my parents who have come here from Calcutta the experience is intensified. The differences are profound. Whole worlds are left behind and whole lives are left behind.”

The New York Times has laid on the praise and enthused that Lahiri’s stories are a reminder of her “appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.”

Source : DNA