Pamela Norris
Among the Naxalites
The daughter of Indian immigrants from West Bengal, Jhumpa Lahiri spent her formative years in America, but she is keenly aware of her Bengali inheritance. Her short-story collections (Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999 and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and Unaccustomed Earth, published in 2008) and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), have explored tensions between Bengali cultural traditions and Western modernity, and the conflict between family duty and individual freedom.
The Lowland, longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, develops these themes. It begins in Calcutta in the 1950s in the modest home where Subhash and Udayan, whose father works as a clerk for the Indian Railways, are growing up. It is the old, familiar story of two contrasting brothers:
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf