#29 – Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, could possibly be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Achingly beautiful prose echoes through each of the stories, and they all have such a resounding and impressive narrative voice that it’s impossible to put the book down once you’ve begun. The stories are as rich and inherently detailed as the best novels aspire to be, which just goes to show that Lahiri’s skills as a storyteller are paramount. She’s one of the best writers working in English today. I know that’s a bold statement, but I’d put forth that she rivals Alice Munro when it comes to ensuring that the form of the short story isn’t relegated to beginner’s classes and college literary journals. The work is powerful, passionate, cutting and emotionally driven. And while each of her stories work with similar themes, first and second generation East Indian families in America, they’re also each distinct both in terms of their internal rhythms and the morals that drive the narratives forward.

In the first half of the book, Lahiri doesn’t really play with form. The stories are straightforward in the sense that they don’t play with time or traditional methods of storytelling, but they are rich in character development, and they do ache with the everyday heartbreak of life. In the second half of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri has written three linked stories. The first two use the second person, which I was resistant to at first, but once I read the last few pages of the book, I understood her choice. You will too. It’s these three linked tales, stories of Hema and Kaushik, characters linked by a common childhood, that will crush your reading soul in the same way any good book should. I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t say anything more about them, just to reiterate that to appreciate them is to appreciate writing at its finest.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT:If I have one criticism, it’s that I’m really not fond of the book’s jacket. Hence no photo, although I guess I could have taken a picture to make it seem less, well, boring.

READING CHALLENGES: I don’t think I’ve read an American author yet for my Around the World in 52 Books. This would be a great one to read for the States. It’s a rich canvas, writing from the perspective of immigrants to the great and fascinatingly flawed country. And while I had Dennis Johnson’s book in mind. I’m going to count this instead. Even if the setting is somewhat secondary to the character development, in a sense, it’s defining of it too, place defines these characters as much as it marginalizes them; it changes their lives from the moment the plane touches down and new homes are built. But it’s also a fascinating study of the idea of what it means to be a part of a second generation in the U.S. How different their lives are from their parents, how charged with being both American and Indian can be, how important it is for history to change perspective.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I was reading Huckleberry Finn on the ride home (I finished Unaccustomed Earth on a hard cement bench outside of The Bay after having a quick bagel with Sam before heading back up to the craziness that is work these days). But I’m not sure if I’ll continue. Maybe, like I said the other day, I’ll finish The Sealed Letter tonight.

Sunday Afternoon

What a full day:

1. I am halfway through Jhumpa Lahiri’s absolutely amazing Unaccustomed Earth. They are short stories that read as rich as a novel.

2. We grocery shopped, went for brunch, bought some second-hand spring clothes, visited the health food store and finally made it home, both exhausted.

3. Ah, Coronation Street. You’re like a salve on a wound. What ARE you thinking Ashley?

4. Gillian Welch, The Revelator, as above. Bless her soul indeed.

5. Editing is a long and painful process. But at least I’ve got pretty toes. The local nail salon has pedicures for $20.00. Seriously, it’s the best money I’ve spent in weeks. Pretty toes do wonders for your self-esteem. I don’t care how girlie that seems.

6. Taking your meds three days late is never a good idea. I can barely stomach sitting up. Silly ragdoll.

A List Of Cliches

[An unfinished fragment; an unfinished thought]

Red roses from a first love years later.
Two separate prom nights: ignored entirely,
dumped days before; golden high school culminates,
in a fumbled pass at virginity.
Abandoned one life for the next and never fit in,
then fell down for all the wrong reasons.

#28 – The Attack

Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack explodes even before it starts. The first few pages describe a woman’s first-hand experience with a bomb in Tel Aviv. Her husband, the story’s narrator, Amin, is a surgeon at the local hospital, and it’s only after a long shift sorting through the casualties after the bomb that he finds out about his wife’s death. For Amin, though, this is just the beginning of the tragedy. It soon comes to light that it was Amin’s wife, Sihem, who wore the bomb that caused the blast. The revelation that his wife became a suicide bomber, a fanatic, someone so unlike the woman he thought he married, turns his life upside down.

Unconvinced that he’s heard even an inch of the full story, Amin turns his back on the entire life he’s built in Tel Aviv, pushed away by angry neighbours, by the pressures of a racially charged situation, he retraces his wife’s last steps. And as many know, when loved ones keep secrets, it’s never easy to learn the truth.

The Attack is a powerful novel, it cuts to the heart of the trouble in the Middle East and portrays a man unable to find himself, he turns his back on his own tribe only to find that it’s just as impossible to fit into the society he’s chosen. Despite the urgent nature of the narrative, the dialogue feels clunky to the point of didacticism. You get the feeling that Khadra’s writing a very important book, but on the whole I felt the novel missed a slight emotional edge. That said, I was utterly engrossed in the story from the very first, most excellent, sentence: “I don’t remember hearing an explosion.”

Amin’s journey is heartbreaking, difficult and, in some ways, unbearably pointless. It’s easy to criticize the awkward storytelling, but absolutely impossible to take the author’s motivation, if I can be so bold as to address it, to task. It’s a raw, honest book that wants to open up a discussion about the very real issues driving the conflict. In that sense, it’s terribly successful. And my criticism about the dialogue aside, there are some wonderful bits of prose in the book, and here’s just one of the many passages I marked:

The bottom’s no good for anybody. In this kind of implosion, if you don’t react very quickly, you lose control of absolutely everything. You become a spectator of your own collapse, and you don’t realize that the abyss is about to close over you forever.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Simply the book sitting on my desk, no biggie. I am excited about the fact that in a few weeks I’ll be back to taking pictures of the books in context at the cottage. Goodness, I miss the cottage.

READING CHALLENGES: I had The Swallows of Kabul on my Around the World in 52 Books last year and only managed to get halfway through the first third of the novel. This year, I had it back again, but am replacing it with The Attack. Because Yasmina Khadra (the nom de plume for Mohammed Moulessehoul) was born in Algeria, I’ll cross off that country, despite the fact that the novel takes place in the Middle East. It’s also the first of eight books in the IMPAC Challenge. I didn’t realize that The Swallows of Kabul was also nominated for the IMPAC, so it’s nice to see this book on the shortlist as well.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Until the packages from Amazon arrive with the rest of the books in the challenge, I’ll probably dive into a classic or finish Emma Donoghue’s latest, The Sealed Letter.

Accidental Wilderness

We watched great machines roll
the stones out as they packed in
the dirt. Waited, until the birds
came back and could be identified.

While the trees sprouted,
and grew into one another,
underground vines trundling down into
hand-made earth, and held fast.

Balanced by the moment, we
could no longer find the path.
By crossing our left and right together,
we climbed out the way we came.

The IMPAC Challenge

Quinn left a comment on a book post a little while ago when I was asking for summer reading suggestions. He had a fabulous one, one that I’ve already started. Said he:

“dude! we can be on the pretend jury for the Impac prize and try to get through the 8 novels on this year’s shortlist in the next 2 months”.

Of course, I think this is a fab idea, considering that a) my all-time favourite book of last year, Out Stealing Horses, was an IMPAC winner, and b) it’s quite an international list, which means 52 Countries books as well. Also, I like that librarians all around the world nominate the books, even if a jury does do the final deliberations, and let’s not forget to mention it’s the richest literary prize in the whole damn world.

Here are the 8 shortlisted books for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award:

1. The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas
*This will also count as Spain

2. The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne
*This will count as Sri Lanka

3. DeNiro’s Game by Rawi Hage
*This will count as Lebanon, as Hage was born in Beirut.

4. Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
*This would have been Australia if I hadn’t already read the amazing Tim Winton.

5. Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua
*This will count as Israel

6. The Attack by Yasmina Khadra
*This will be Algeria
Finished on Saturday, April 19th, 2008

7. Winterwood by Patrick McCabe

8. The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine

So there you have it, all eight titles, many of which I’m having a heck of a time getting in Canada. Right now I’ve started with The Attack (Quinn’s already one book ahead of me) and once my package arrives from Amazon.ca with The Speed of Light, The Woman Who Waited, and DeNiro’s Game, I’ll at least have half the titles I need. The rest I’m going to try to track down this weekend.

UPDATED TO ADD: Winterwood, Let It Be Morning, and Dreams of Speaking are coming from Amazon.co.uk. That just leaves one title, The Sweet and Simple Kind, that I can’t seem to buy anywhere.

Wider Sidewalks

Sam and M are doing poems this month, and I’ve been lax in mine even though I said to both of them I thought a poem a day was a good idea. At least I’ve managed one:

Wider Sidewalks

Today already feels outmoded,
antennas on roofs,
a last sip in the bottle,
a frowned-upon plastic bag,
even if the sun remains.