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Loading... The Lowland (original 2013; edition 2013)by Jhumpa Lahiri
Work InformationThe Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)
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Excellent writing. ( ) I love Lahiri's writing. I don't quite understand how she does it but she makes you feel like you are deep inside her characters. The Lowland is sad, like much of her work, and most of her characters are unlikeable, but I still enjoyed the novel, although I am not entirely sure why. Edited: a day has gone by since I finished and the more I look back on this story the more I like it. Upped rating to four stars. At times like these I wish I were able to write a real book review. Not enough. clearly, to actually work on writing good book reviews. But that's cool, just going to write this for myself, as a reminder. The Lowland is very much a novel of relationships and life trajectories, and there's something very classic about it. I'd like to read someone else's comparison to, I don't know, the Buddenbrooks or something. I enjoyed the lack of resolution and the unhappiness in some characters, the distance in tone, and the contemplation. As usual when I find a book to be subtle and moving and very thoughtful, there's a whole lot of reviews calling it flat and dull and unengaging. Fascinated by what that hints at about how we think about the world and express ourselves. Anyway, not in love with this book, there were moments when I wasn't into it (when do I ever enjoy relationship narratives?), but I can already tell that the memory of it is going to reassert itself in my thoughts for a long time to come. Let's start off by saying, if you haven't read Lahiri before, don't start here. The Lowlands tells the tale of two brothers whose lives take two very divergent paths - - but who remain connected by one woman. It's a saga in the sense that it covers the brothers' lives from young childhood through old age/death. I wanted to love this book. I've really, really enjoyed all of Lahiri's other works. This book is more of a "critics darling" in my opinion. It's beautifully written, and Lahiri deftly traverses time, place, and point of view. Her writing is both simple and yet very evocative. Yet something was missing. I felt that the pace was just a bit too slow and that the book lacked suspense. One brother was a character you could really embrace, but it was hard to care about the fates of the other characters . . .even though I thought they were portrayed realistically. They just weren't very sympathetic. It really would have been a three star read for me overall except that the last several chapters were much more compelling, and I ended up feeling glad that I had read the book. If we had a 3.5 rating, I'd truly be using that . . .but since we don't, I rounded up to 4 stars. Overall, if you like Lahiri, AND you really like literary fiction, I would say keep this book on your TBR. If you are looking for entertainment, I'd say steer clear.
The Lowland is a novel about the rashness of youth, as well as the hesitation and regret that can make a long life not worth living. Darkly hued fiction is commonplace in contemporary writing, but The Lowlands is sombre in a distinctly old-fashioned way; it’s not late-stage capitalism and/or environmental collapse that generate the misery in the novel, but rather that quaint concept of fate, or at least character-as-fate. Which is one reason why contemporary readers might balk at this story, its position on the shortlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize notwithstanding. These lives seem rigged. There is real story bravery at work here. It would have been much easier for Lahiri to keep us in the thrust and heave of political agitation — to fixate, perhaps, on the implied betrayal woven into Subhash’s rescue. Instead, in “The Lowland,” Lahiri tells a quietly devastating story about the nature of kindness. How it is never pure and often goes largely unrewarded. It simply is, and then the floodwaters rise and obscure its role in the landscape for a time. Her prose, as always, is a miracle of delicate strength, like those threads of spider silk that, wound together, are somehow stronger than steel.... Although writing this fine is easy to praise, it’s not always easy to enjoy. And there’s something naggingly synthetic about this tableau of woe. “They were a family of solitaries,” Lahiri writes. “They had collided and dispersed.” But real people are not such shiny billiard balls of sorrow. I couldn’t shake the impression that Subhash and Gauri are being subjected to the author’s insistence on creating a certain sustained effect, as though they were characters in a fable. The years pass like the pages of a calendar being blown between scenes of a silent movie. Every time we catch up with this sad couple, they seem not to have changed at all, except that the plaque of guilt and secrecy has grown thicker. The ordinary complications of daily life do not dilute their desolation or complicate their lives. Gauri spends decades studying philosophy, but somehow the world’s accumulated wisdom never offers her any solace or disruption or insight. She might as well have been studying accounting or geology. Perhaps these are petty complaints about a book that’s written with such poignancy. If parts of “The Lowland” feel static, it’s also true that Lahiri can accelerate the passage of time in moments of terror with mesmerizing effect. Lahiri has an uncanny ability to control and mold sentences and action, imbuing the characters with dignity and restraint. But for me, this was also the novel's weakness; too often the narration felt cold, almost clinical, leaving me longing for a moment of thaw. I felt ambivalent. It's an intelligently structured book and while the tone and the pace rarely vary, the reader is always sure she is in the hands of a writer of integrity and skill. Yet I still yearned to know more about these people, especially Gauri.... Lahiri is an accomplished writer and though I felt, at times, disappointed, in the end I was sure that there is an important truth here — that life often denies us understanding, and sometimes all there is to hold on to is our ability to endure. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: National Book Award Finalist Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize From 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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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