A Passage From India Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel of time and loss

摘要

It's not intended as a criticism when i say that Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel is two-thirds epilogue. If The Lowland declines to conform to a conventional three-act structure, it's only because reality often does the same thing. Some people's lives are all buildup with no payoff; for Lahiri's characters, life is largely aftermath. The book introduces itself to the reader as a novel about two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, growing up in Calcutta in the 1960s. Udayan is bold, brilliant and headstrong; he spends his college days becoming enmeshed in a radical political movement. Older by 15 months, Subhash is the cautious, methodical one; he leaves for Rhode Island to pursue a doctorate in oceanography. The passage from India to the U.S. is as much a structural part of Lahiri's novels as paragraphs and chapters: Subhash leaves Calcutta "as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day."