Jhumpa Lahiri
05/2019
Indian-American Indian American Immigrant
Mrs. Jones leads a life Ashoke's mother would consider humiliating: eating alone, driving herself to work in snow and sleet, seeing her children and grandchildren, at most, three or four times a year (48)
Assured by his grades and apparent indifference to girls, his parents don't suspect Gogol of being in his own fumbling way, an American teenager (93)
Gogol wonders what it is like for his father to be without his mother and Sonia. He wonders if he is lonely. But his father is not the type to admit such things, to speak only of his desires, his moods, his needs. (122)
He walks in with his shoes on instead of changing into a pair of flip-flops that his parents keep in the hall closet (146)
If there is a dinner invitation at a friends', they go together, driving along the highway without the children, sadly aware that Gogol and Sonia, now both grown, will never sit with them in the back seat again (163)
She has given birth to vagabonds (167)
This is the way he still finds her most ravishing, unadorned, aware that it is a way she is willing to look for no one but him (226)
She both fits in perfectly yet remains slightly novel. Here Moushumi had reinvented herself, without misgivings, without guilt. He admires her, ever resents her a little, for having moved to another country and made a separate life. He realizes that this is what their parents had done in America. What he, in all likelihood, will never do (233)
It is a cafe they've been to before, and he feels the slight nostalgia it is sometimes possible to feel at the end of an extended stay in a foreign place, taking in the details that will soon evaporate from his mind (233)
He looks up from the book, at the sky, at the darkness gathering, the clouds a deep, beautiful gold, and momentarily stopped by a flock of pigeons flying dangerously close. Suddenly terrified, he ducks his head, feeling foolish afterward. None of the other pedestrians has reacted. He stops and watches as the birds shoot up, then land simultaneously on two neighboring bare-branched trees. He is unsettled by the sight. He has seen these graceless birds on windowsills and sidewalks, but never in trees. It looks almost unnatural. And yet, what could be more ordinary? (272)
True to the meaning of her name, she will be without borders, without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere. (276)
But fortunately they have not considered it their duty to stay married, as Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima's generation do. They are not willing to accept, to adjust, to settle for something less than their ideal of happiness. That pressure has given way, in the case of subsequent generation, to American common sense. (276)
She takes a deep breath. In a moment she will hear the beeps of the security system the garage door opening, car doors closing, her children's voices in the house. She applies lotion to her arms and legs, reaches for a peach-colored terrycloth robe that hangs from a hook on the door. Her husband had given her the robe years ago, for a Christmas now long forgotten. This too she will have to give away, will have no use for where she is going. In such a humid climate it would take days for such a thick material to dry. She makes a note to herself, to wash it well and donate it to the thrift shop. She does not remember opening it, or her reaction. She knows only that it had been either Gogol or Sonia who had picked it out at one of the department stores at the mall, had wrapped it, even. That all her husband had done was write his name and hers on th to-and-from tag. She does not fault him for this. Such omissions of devotion, of affection, she knows now, do not matter in the end. She no longer wonders what it might have been like to do what her children have done, to fall in love first rather than years later, to deliberate over a period of months or years and not a single afternoon, which was the time it had taken for her and Ashoke to agree to wed. It is the image of their two names on the tag that she thinks of, a tag she had not bothered to save. It reminds her of their life together, of the unexpected life he, in choosing to marry her, had given her here, which she had refused for so many years to accept. And though she still does not feel fully at home within these walls on Pemberton Road she knows that this is home nevertheless--the world for which she is responsible, which she has created, which is everywhere around her, needing to be packed up, given away, thrown out bit by bit. She slips her damp arms into the sleeves of the robe, ties the belt around her waist. It's always been a little short on her, a size too small. Its warmth is a comfort all the same (280)
And yet it was for him, for Sonia, that his parents had gone to the trouble of learning these customs. It was for their sake that it had come to all of this (286)
Beautiful book.
Wonderfully catches dynamics between parents and child, particularly those foreign to America who raise their children in America.
The prose is simple, has a regular cadence and unveils a scene's feeling in well-developed pieces. There is much use of describing two or things in a room in suffient detail which leads to an understanding of the setting. The book has a somewhat fast cadence of this, then this, then this, sort of a feel. It is the events themselves that hold value. It is a beautiful articulation of a very human experience. She speaks honestly, most likely from her own experiences.