If I were to rate this book, I would give it two stars. As far as the writing goes, it’s more or less fine. It’s amatuerish because of the nature of the project. Jhumpa Lahiri is writing in Italian, a language she’s learned late in life and exploring as a kind of project, and this is the translation of a speech given at a conference. It reads like someone giving a speech in a language that they learned late in life. It’s limited in its […]
“You remind me of everything that followed.”
This was a really beautiful story. I would highly recommend listening to the audio version if you can. The narrator’s accent was amazing. I could have listened to it all day. “In so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another…They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and […]
A Vivid, Gorgeous Read
I really, really enjoyed The Namesake, and it completely deserved my first five-star ranking of 2017. It’s about the son of Indian immigrants and his experiences growing up in America, and how his name shapes the man he becomes. I wrote about deciding on the stars it needed and what I liked about it here! A sidebar: I’m here to give this a shot again in 2017! I wrote a few reviews in early 2016, but eventually tapered off because I found it so difficult to […]
A memoir about language
When I was a child, my mom took my sister and me to Spanish lessons each week for something like a year or two (I honestly don’t remember). She was determined that we would grow up to be bilingual. Well, after Spanish lessons as a child, Spanish 1 and 2 in high school, and Intermediate Spanish in College, I’m still not bilingual. I’ve had trouble explaining to my mom why that is, especially since I spent a summer with my best friend’s family, who is […]
All That’s in a Name
This week I finished The Namesake, the first novel of Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. When I first picked it up I had no idea what it was about, and knew only that Lahiri’s second novel The Lowland had been nominated for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in 2013. In my decision to diversify my reading list, her works made their way to the top of my TBR pile. Read the rest of the review here.
The Tiring of Popcultureboy 2: Tiring Harder
I don’t quite know why I’m doing the Booker Longlist Challenge, since it’s really become a forced march of books I haven’t really enjoyed reading that much. I had high hopes for The Lowland, since the synopsis sounds aces, but it just didn’t do it for me. I found it a mostly frustrating read, difficult characters and an odd blank style don’t really mesh for me. Subhash and Udayan Mitra are brothers growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart. It’s the politically tumultuous 1960s, and […]