One September evening in 2004, my first week in the US, my husband took me to his favorite bookstore on Castro street, in Mountain View. I remember picking ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ from the shelf and browsing through the pages. The writer’s name Jhumpa sounded anything but Indian. I didn’t know about the Bengali nicknames back then:-)
Surprisingly, years passed before I started reading her. In Dec 2007, we watched the movie ‘the Namesake’ but it did not prompt me to pick the book. Somehow Indian immigrant experiences felt uninteresting to me at the time even though I was living that life. When ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ got published and skyrocketed to the top of the New York Times Best Seller’s List, a rare feat for a serious book of short stories, I realized I have waited too long and thus the journey began. Since then, I have read most of her work except the Namesake! I am waiting for the right time to read it … when one wants to look back and reminisce.
Lahiri achieved success early on winning the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000 for her first book ‘Interpreter of Maladies’. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, who is a fan of her work. One fine day, she left it all and moved her family to Italy, reinventing herself as a writer in Italian. Last Spring, Cupertino Library gave fans like me an opportunity to hear her speak through “The Distinguished Author Series”. Few photos from the zoom meeting, the best one is marked by a warning :-)
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