Here for all of our readers in USA and other english spoken countries who faithfully visit our site!
Now we have completed our own chosen little lecture serie from the Culture House International Writers' Stage in Stockholm.
Our authors and their performances from the spring is Deborah Levy and her Swimming Home (Deborah Levy och hennes Simma hem) Etgar Keret and his dark absurdism in Suddenly there's a knock on the door (Plötsligt knackar det på dörren.)
Books that we have already written about, and today it's time for Jhumpa Lahiri and Lowland.
If Deborah Levy and Etgar Keret are experimenting more with the shape of their books and take cover, hiding behind dark streaks of absurd and twisted humor, as Jhumpa Lahiri has a more quiet and classic tells tempo. She dares to have more courage, show up the cracks, sorrow and silence surrounding a traumatic drama that is also a part of India's modern history. The story also carries a theme of breaking up - through study, research, and live in exil.
The main characters, two brothers Subhash and Udayan and a woman Gauri, is wordless despite their academic formation, they carry on a spiritual loneliness and sadness. It can be explained by the younger brother's violent death, he belonged to naxalit movement - Indian Maoists, and he was executed by the Indian police in front of the eyes before his family, who witness the event.
The grief after his brother's death deepens and becomes an unhealed wounds much by their inability to deal with it, not to talk about it, and by the surviving brother enters into a marriage with the widow of his brother, who is pregnant with the dead brother's children.
Which becomes a (monster) secretly to the outside world in their exile in the United States.
Sure, Jhumpa Lahiris novel (marsh) Lowland is a story about living in exile, the gap between East and West, three academically gifted young people choices and path, break with the family and a young woman's confinement and her way out, silence in the form of conventions, manipulation, the stresses in the Indian class society and alienation in the United States.
All that is familiar themes in modern Western society and in a global world. But it is in the portrait of Gauri and her destiny and choices as the novel grows to a great story with a tragic and complex dimensions. Gauri become a successful academics and researchers in philosophy but unable to free her herself from her past, as early orphan, young oppressed widow and her life in a marriage of his own and the baby's sake as for her to USA.
She is both a victim and a winner coming out through her brain (she is smart and intelligent) but abandons her baby Bela who grow up as a teenager without a mother and with the surviving brother Subhash as father and Bela may not has the keys to her story .
Jhumpa Lahiri has created an extremely well written story where environmental and descriptions of nature are very geographically initiated from water hyacinths in Tollygunge in Calcutta during monsoon to coastal landscape around Rhode Island with its islands on the U.S. East Coast and into southern California's dry hot desert environments harboring so many misguided people who traveled westward and left their biographical behind.
Language is simple and unadorned, without irony, landscape descriptions form a sadness and melancholy frame around the story mosaic of (blues) grief.
Jhumpa Lahiri must have worked a lot with her story, deleted and rewritten!
One of the secrets behind all the good stories!
Lowland is a strong story larger than life itself, we think in Kista Light.
Score five blooming water hyacinths of five
Above from an interwiew with jhumpa Lahiri at her home. Both Jhumpa Lahiri and Etgar Keret (see above) talking about a feeling of solitude and loneliness as a platform for their writing and autorship.
At Kulturhuset in April at its International Writers' Stage in Stockholm conversed Jhumpa Lahiri with a very bushy moderator Josette Bushell Mingo who sometimes forgot the topic, Lahiris authorship, and most talked about herself, ouch ... ouch, but she brought a lot of energy to the conversation and Jhumpa Lahiri replied patiently, intelligent and well-balanced.
Asked about favorite novel and ditto author Jhumpa Lahiri responds to Thomas Hardy and his novel Tess is one of the absolute favorites. Knowledge of this novel can also be a key to understanding the portrait of Gauri in the Lowland.
Jhumpa Lahiri find herself with Lowland to have passed a theme with her writing so far, and has since some time now settled in Rome with his family to learn a new language and get on with writing.
Kista Light hastens to signing after the meeting - early in the queue with the usual Thommy with Th should it be!
Jhumpa seems intelligent, an observer and she looks great!
Has she greengreybrown eyes?
Asking if Jhumpa Lahiri in his writing has been influenced by Salmon Rushdie and his Midnight Children?
Maybe a little bit!
I do not know really she said!
Kista Light believe in hindsight that it is marginally, Bengal is located in eastern India and bordering Bangla Desh but similar themes in their writings but large differences in entitles eighteen.
Instead, I ask if she would like to write a few lines in Italian when she signs?
Do you understand italian?
No but my son does!
Bueno Lettera!
Tanti saluti!
/ Jhumpa
Andra bloggar om Kista Andra bloggar om fotografi Andra bloggar om litteratur Andra bloggar om klassresor Andra bloggar om författare: Andra bloggar om Stockholm Andra bloggar om skrivande
© Thommy Sjöberg
