Regal alien
Last night Araceli and I went to see fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri read from her new novel. The huge crowd gave me the opportunity to do plenty of people-watching while I was waiting in line. Lahiri fans of every color and stripe were present.
She read chapter three of The Namesake in its entirety. We can hardly wait to get the book back from the friend of ours who stood in line to get us an autograph (we had to get home to release the babysitter). The novel appears to possess all the virtues of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.
All things Indian are all the rage these days, but I think fads have very little, if anything, to do with Lahiri’s success. Her stories are populated with characters struggling to keep their balance in the winds of vicissitude: Indian-Americans in America, Indian-Americans in India, Indians in America, and Indians in an increasingly American India. The multicultural themes of her work have a broad appeal, especially in this country which is going through its own identity crisis.
I also relate as a Christian to Lahiri’s turmoil-filled worlds. She captures—inadvertently, as far as I know—both the anguish and the humor to be found in Christians’ experience as a class of expatriates.
Check out the good things that our bookish friends from a Strange Land are doing.
[…] They were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Heb 11:13–16)
“I [Jesus] do not ask that you [Father] take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.” (Jn 17:15–16)
