Review: Derailments - World & I
Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, a collection of short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies, met with acclaim when it was published in 1999, winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Metcalf Award. The stories, set in India and America, considered the connection of place and identity, particularly the identity of the immigrant, who becomes more or less assimilated into a new world, more or less distanced from his native land. The Namesake continues that theme of identity, complicating it with questions about cultural disorientation, loyalty to one's personal and national heritage, and the significance of traditions, family, and, most essentially, one's very name. It is a book about possibility and loss, elegantly and delicately written, and, as Lahiri has admitted in interviews, about themes deeply and personally felt.