The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Een Bengaalse familie blijft tot in de derde generatie lijden onder de gewelddadige dood van de revolutionair ingestelde jongste zoon.

I enjoyed this book but didn't love it. I found the constant changes between characters and time periods interrupted my immersion in the story. I wish there was more explanation about Gauri''s behavior because what was provided was disjointed and almost an afterthought.

I slammed through this novel very quickly, and 10 years or so later after reading and loving The Namesake, I remember how much I love Jhumpa Lahiri's lovely and lilting use of language. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even the heart-wrenching whole of it.

Distinctly different from her usual immigrant experiential narrative. Of course, it still retains the cultural shifts but she has approached the immigrant experience more of freeing up from the shackles of the characters homeland. The Naxalite narrative may raise some hackles in terms of accuracy but it's merely the background strife that tears the family apart. It can easily be any other political upheaval in India that we don't seem to lack.

Jhumpa Lahiri's books have this tendency of making you poignant while and after you're done reading but somehow you seem to come back to her books; perhaps we do enjoy being sad

I'm a bit confused by the book blurb, since this story is just as much a story about an entire family as it is about “two brothers”; that said, no blurb could really cover the ground that this book covers. Full of poignant looks into several different lives, tracing how a serious tragedy can play out for over forty years (for better and for worse), it's difficult to not reflect on one's own life in comparison to the lives lived in the book.

The writing is straightforward, almost to a fault–usually I enjoy a bit more wordplay, but for this story it works just fine, laying out these lives like points on a map.