The Nuts and Bolts

The Sanbornton Public Library book group meets approximately every 6 weeks on

Wednesday nights from 7-8 pm.

 

All are welcome! For those who prefer not to purchase the titles, copies of the books are available from the Library.

 

For more information, please contact the Library (286-8288 * spl@metrocast.net) or Emily Vinton at 286-7422 / emilyv@metrocast.net.

 

Book Group Schedule 

"Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri

Wednesday, September 30, 7-8 p.m.

 

Unaccustomed Earth

More information about the book and author here:

http://www.jhumpalahiri.net/

 

Summary

From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

 

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself.

 

In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night.

 

In “Only Goodness,” a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family.

 

And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

 

Reviews

"Stunning. [Lahiri] delves deeply and richly into the lives of immigrants. [But though] immigrants may be the stories’ protagonists, their doubts, insecurities, losses and heartbreaks belong to all of us. Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the secrets of the human heart. . . . In part, Lahiri’s gift to the reader is gorgeous prose that bestows greatness on life’s mundane events and activities. But it is her exploration of lost love and lost loved ones that gives her stories an emotional exactitude few writers could ever hope to match.”

     —USA Today

 

"Lucid and revelatory. . . . Universal and deeply felt. . . . Lahiri is far too accomplished and empathic a writer to relax her gaze; she excels at uncovering character and choosing detail”

     —The Washington Post Book World

 

"A tour de force. . . . [Lahiri] has captured more clearly than ever before a restless feeling of uprootedness that is as representative of America now, in the post–9/11 era, as the credo of wide–eyed openness ever was.” —Slate

 

"Beautifully crafted. . . . The remarkable poignancy Lahiri achives in her work . . . is the result of tying [her] examination of exile to other, more universal moments of essential sadness in our lives: the death of a parent, the end of a love affair, the ravages of alcoholism on a family.”

     —The Boston Globe

 

“Shimmering . . . The literary prize committees should once again take note . . . To read [Unaccustomed Earth] and only take away an experience of cultural tourism would be akin to reading Dante only to retain how medieval Italians slurped their spaghetti. Lahiri’s fiction delves deep into the universal theme of isolation. . . . Lahiri is a lush writer bringing to life worlds through a pile-up of detail. But somehow all that richness electrifyingly evokes the void. . . . It’s customary when reviewing short story collections to adopt a ‘one from column A, two from column B’ kind of structure—you know, the title story always gets a ritual nod, followed by a run-down of which stories are the strongest, which have just been included for filler. But another stereotype-confounding aspect of Lahiri’s writing is that there aren’t any weak stories here: every one seems like the best, the most vivid, until you read the next one. . . . Lahiri ingeniously reworks the situation of characters subsisting at point zero, of being stripped down like Lear on the heath. [Unaccustomed Earth] certainly makes a contribution to the literature of immigration, but it also takes its rightful place with modernist tales from whatever culture in which characters find themselves doomed to try and fail to only connect.”

      —Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air”

 

"Graceful and devastating. . . . A gorgeous, meticulous and inviting work . . . of an artist wise in enigmas and human mystery.”

     —The Miami Herald

 

"Splendid. . . . Sensitive. . . . Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration”

     —The New York Review of Books

 

"Gorgerous. . . . [Unaccustomed Earth] showcases a considerable talent in full bloom.”

      —San Francisco Chroncile

 

“Profound . . . Powerful . . . Haunting . . . Lahiri’s prose here is deceptively simple, its mechanics invisible, as she enters into her characters’ innermost journeys. [In the title story,] the moment-to-moment rendering of Ruma’s vulnerability and her father’s rising panic at all that he’s keeping secret sweeps the reader into a compelling emotional landscape. . . . Lahiri invests [her characters] with great depth. [She is] a writer working at the height of her powers.”

     —Los Angeles Times Book Review 

 

"[Lahiri] explores with her modulated prose a full range of relationships among her subjects. So thoroughly and judiciously does she use detail that she easily presents entire lives with each story. These are tales of careful observation and adjustment.”

      —The Atlantic

 

"Exquisite, transcendent. . . . Lahiri is a writer of luminous prose and indelible stories. . . . Astonishing.”

      —The Philadelphia Inquirer

 

"[Unaccustomed Earth] has a powerful emotional resonance that transcends what has been classified as immigrant fiction and instead assumes a universality as characters struggle with authenticity, assimilation and independence. Lahiri is a genius of the miniature stroke and the great arc.”

     —Chicago Tribune