![]() ![]() ![]() It's not that she ignores India or immigration. ![]() Her new book begins with a quote from Hawthorne, and this stirringly existential anthology recalls the New Englander JD Salinger's pessimistic vision of human relationships. Lahiri, a Bengali-American who's been lauded as a teller of immigrant tales, is at core an old-guard New England writer. It awes him, just as it did New England's transcendentalist writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. For Kaushik, the great American wilderness is a kind of temple. After journeying through pine forests and contemplating ocean that "was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times", he's able to sense an elusive power, a power he believes his deceased mother now possesses. He drives northward, aimlessly, towards the desolate, craggy country near the Canadian border. Devastated by his mother's death and his father's acquisition of a replacement bride, Kaushik, a protagonist in Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection of short stories, storms out of the wealthy suburbs of Massachusetts. ![]()
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