one of the best contemporary Indian writers in English, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth is very powerful in the images that she draws for her audience...
in this, she almost weilds a magic paintbrush and paints vividly, with a deft combination of thick and thin strokes, choosing appropriate colours as she goes on finetuning the imagery. Each of the characters, whether present in her stories or not -- Romi, for instance in the first story, from which the book derives its name, is not really present in the canvas, but is there in the readers' mind -- is most likey to remain with them for a long time.
there is a certain subtelty in Lahiri's prose, a certain hold that she establishes almost from the start over the reader which, while giving them the freedom to get inside the book and exploring the minds of each of the characters, does not let go of her/him until the book is over.
each story in this collection is on the lives of Bengali immigrants in the US. the rootlessness is stark in the second generation and is brought out by Lahiri so very clearly... here, possibly because she herself is a second generation immigrant, Lahiri can empathise so well with Kaushik and Hema (in Hema And Kaushik, a short novella, within the collection, written in a unique format) or Sudha and Rahul (the brother-sister duo in Only Goodness).
For me, the last mentioned was the best story in this collection... it brought back so many autobiographical similarities to the fore which i thought, i had simply forgotten...
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