Jhumpa Lahiri: evaluation

Transcript context

…One of the things I’ve liked about comments you’ve dropped, is the way you read, say, Scarlet Letter, as actually a novel of immigrants. That maybe the characters wouldn’t have behaved that way in a “home” country. Even a lot of Hardy, especially Tess, a favorite of yours, you can read as a kind of immigrant novel. Coming from the countryside, moving somewhere quite strange — to use that as a lens for interpreting what otherwise might seem like strange character behaviors. Reading them through you is actually very rewarding, through your eyes, through your fiction. Does that make sense to you at all? Yes. I think what I’m responding to is the sense of displacement in those authors, in almost any author. Even Willa Cather you can read this way; Homer you can read this way. So many authors you can read this way. Some years ago I was asked this question by the New York Times Book Review about what was my problem with immigrant literature, and I made a maybe cheeky remark about how I didn’t believe in it. But it wasn’t being cheeky. It was just saying what I felt was true, which is that this is something I’ve responded to in literature from the very beginning. If I didn’t have this response to literature, then these writers wouldn’t have fed and inspired me the way they did because there would’ve been a “barrier” between their experiences and their times and mine, and that shouldn’t be the case. That’s not what literature does. Literature does the opposite. It allows us to cross over those boundaries in a beautiful way, in a magical way. If I can trust the Internet, you have three master’s degrees in creative writing, comparative literature, and English, and for one of your degrees, you translated six Bengali short stories by Ashapoorna Devi, who’s a Bengali writer, maybe the most famous woman writer or even most famous writer in Bengal for much of the 20th century. What connects you to her and what problem were you trying to solve by engaging in her work?…

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