This year the Slow Reading Discussion Group will be continuing its close study of works that explore, from a variety of perspectives, the rich theme of displacement.
The Slow Reading Discussion Group will continue our exploration of works that treat the theme of displacement with a second reading by Jhumpa Lahiri--her story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, published in 2008, 5 years after The Namesake.
The central characters in these stories, like those in the novel and like Lahiri's own family of origin, are predominantly middle-class professional Bengali immigrants aspiring to make a better life for themselves in the new world. Lahiri's epigraph to this collection, however, taken from another New England chronicler of an earlier migration, Nathanial Hawthorne, emphasizes the positive value--at least for the second generation--of such an uprooting:
"Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots in unaccustomed earth" (from "The Custom-House," prefatory essay to The Scarlet Letter, 1850).
For this meeting, please read "Once in a Lifetime" (pp. 223 - 251) and "Year's End" (pp. 252 - 293), in Unaccustomed Earth.
AGE GROUP: | Adults about 55 and over | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Books and Authors |
