National Book Award FinalistShortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker PrizeFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary new novel, set in both India and America, that expands the scope and range of one of our most dazzling storytellers: a tale of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death. Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn...
This Family Saga give to us some advantages, like this :
1. Selfless or selfish? I never could decide.
As someone who loved The Namesake, perhaps my expectations were too high. I was really hoping The Lowland would be great. Unfortunately, for me, it fell flat.
Brothers Subhash (the responsible serious one) and Udayan (15 months younger, and the rebellious one) grew up together in Calcutta during the politically tumultuous 60's. After college, Subhash heads to the US to further his studies, Udayan stays in Calcutta and becomes involved in a political uprising. When he is killed, leaving behind a pregnant wife, Subhash steps in and fills the role of husband to widowed Gauri and father to his niece-to-be.
The Pros: This is a period in history I knew very little about. Lahiri does a great job of summarizing the political landscape of India in the 1960's. I loved learning how the politics of post-colonial India tied to Maoist China, Castro's Cuba, and Che Guevara. For exmple, I had no idea that Castro destroyed most of Cuba's golf courses when he came into power...
2. Another triumph
I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction, but Jhumpa Lahiri is one name that always gets my attention, and her latest book is as good as, if not better than her previous efforts. Even though her characters (typically Bengalis transplanted to the United States) could hardly be farther from my experience, she manages to make them alive and makes us care about what happens to them. And her descriptions of place are so vivid that I felt that I'd been to Calcutta. The book is nominally about the contrasting experiences of two brothers, but that's just what gets things rolling: it's a saga of three (and more) generations of a family dealing with the encounter of two cultures which are very different (and yet in many ways very much the same), and with the moral choices that confront them.
Need more appointment... ?
The Lowland
One of the subjects of Jhumpa Lahiri's second novel is the relationship between historical and personal time, the way single lives can encompass remarkably different places and eras, the persistence of the past. It spans two continents and more than fifty years in the lives of several characters. As such, it's a difficult book to review without at least hinting at certain plot details that readers might like to discover for themselves. So those who want to experience the book with little or no sense of what happens should stop at the end of this paragraph for fear of SPOILERS. For them, and for those who prefer brief reviews, the next couple sentences will have to suffice. THE LOWLAND is an impressive, frequently moving novel, treating with quiet realism events that could easily have degenerated into melodrama. It expresses with new force the journey from mid-twentieth century India to contemporary America that has been a consistent feature of Lahiri's fiction, reminding us that for...
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