Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Quick Take: The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri

I would have read The Lowland regardless of its inclusion in The Tournament of Books, and if memory serves, I started the book before the tournament was announced.  I've been reading Lahiri since I first heard of her Pulitzer Prize winning collection The Interpreter of Maladies, and I've since read her first novel The Namesake.  Both are excellent.  Lahiri is a must-read author.  Period.

Published in 2013, The Lowland is her latest novel and it as good as I expected it to be, which is quite.

Lahiri deals with family and family expectations in this novel of brothers, one who becomes a revolutionary in 1960's India, the other who moves to America to study.  When the revolutionary is killed, the academic returns home, marries the brother's wife, and brings her and the baby back to America.  The primary focus is on Subhash, the academic, but Lahiri intersperses this with glimpses of the past with the revolutionary and also of the wife.

This is a fantastic novel and I am once again eagerly awaiting her next book (though I still have her second story collection Unaccustomed Earth to tide me over).

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