Introduced by Wesley Brown.

This event is sponsored, in part, by the Office of Student Leadership, Involvement, and Programs, and by the Rutgers Graduate Student Association.

Jhumpa Lahiri is the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for her first published collection, Interpreter of Maladies. These stories are filled with unforgettable and haunting characters, who must deal with cultural assimilation, marital conflicts, disappointment, and quiet triumph. The book was a bestseller as well as a critical favorite. Her first novel, The Namesake, has been equally well received by critics and mass audiences alike.

Raised in Rhode Island by Calcutta-born parents, Lahiri has spoken about the “feeling that there was no single place to which I fully belonged.” From an early age, Lahiri felt the tension between her allegiance to her parents’ Indian traditions and the American world of her friends and her education: “I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment, and vice versa. I felt that I led two very separate lives.” The Namesake tells the story of Gogol Ganguli, a first-generation American who struggles with these same issues, working out a balance between his American surroundings, the immigrant community to which he belongs, and the pressure he feels to imagine a homeland in an India that he doesn’t really know.

The Namesake

When he looks back to the child, the eyes are open, staring up at him, unblinking, as dark as the hair on its head. The face is transformed; Ashoke has never seen a more perfect thing. He imagines himself as a dark, grainy, blurry presence. As a father to his son. Again he thinks of the night he was nearly killed, the memory of those hours that have forever marked him flickering and fading in his mind. Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second.

Responses

Excerpts from “A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri”

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/lahiri/

1. On the significance of setting in her work:

1R. When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts were, for some reason, always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well as a result of repeated visits with my family […] Eventually, I started to set my stories in America, and as a result the majority of stories in Interpreter of Maladies have an American setting. Still, though I’ve never lived anywhere but America, India continues to form part of my fictional landscape.

2. On the idea of identity:

2R. The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children. […] I think that for immigrants, the challenges of exile, the loneliness, the constant sense of alienation, the knowledge of and longing for a lost world, are more explicit and distressing than for their children. On the other hand, the problem for the children of immigrants – those with strong ties to their country of origin – is that they feel neither one thing nor the other.

3. On the tradition of naming in Bengali families:

3R. I can’t speak for all Bengalis. But all the Bengalis I know personally, especially those living in India, have two names, one public, one private. It’s always fascinated me. I’m like Gogol [in The Namesake] in that my pet name inadvertently became my good name. I have two other names on my passport and my birth certificate (my mother couldn’t settle on just one). But when I was enrolled in school the teachers decided that Jhumpa was the easiest of my names to pronounce and that was that. To this day many of my relatives think that it’s both odd and inappropriate that I’m known as Jhumpa in an official, public context.

4. On writing from the male point of view:

4R. In the beginning, I think it was mainly curiosity. I have no brothers, and growing up, men generally seemed like mysterious creatures to me. Except for an early story I wrote in college, the first thing I wrote from the male point of view was the story “This Blessed House,” in Interpreter of Maladies. It was an exhilarating and liberating thing to do, so much so that I wrote three stories in a row, all from the male perspective. It’s a challenge, as well.

5. On the transition from writing stories to a novel:

5R. I feel attracted to both forms. Moving from the purity and intensity of the short story to the broader canvas of the novel felt liberating and, at times, overwhelming. Writing a novel is certainly more demanding than writing a story, and the stakes are higher. […] At the same time, there’s something more forgiving about a novel. It’s roomier, messier, more tolerant than a short story. The action isn’t under a microscope in quite the same way. Short stories, no matter how complex, always have a ruthless, distilled quality. They require more control than novels. I hope I can continue to write both.

Biography

Jhumpa Lahiri is the youngest person to win the Pulitzer Prize. Her collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, is also one of the very few debut works – and only a handful of story collections – to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Interpreter of Maladies became an international bestseller and won a host of other awards and honors: it was named the Best Debut of the Year by The New Yorker, and won a PEN/Hemingway Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. Her first novel, The Namesake, was published in September of 2003, and was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection. Lahiri holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Boston University, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

Wesley Brown is the author of two novels, Tragic Magic, and Darktown Strutters, and three produced plays, including Life During Wartime. Brown is also co-editor of the multicultural anthologies Imagining America and Visions Of America, as well as editor of The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. He is a Professor of English at Rutgers University.