Posted:
@ Kool and Samarth,
Am in the midst of sundry other things so this is going to be a long and sporadic exchange, but....
I agree that some factors unrelated to Lahiri's writing may quite possibly have influenced the committee's decision. Some of them are: the political correctness of awarding prizes to diasporic instead of mainstream English writers, and then to women, her youth and good looks - which we imagine the judges are blind to or even unconsciously unaffected by, but in fact that is not the case -, the general intellectual glamour that attaches to literary Bengalis, especially those from academic families on the East Coast - and here we're dealing with an MIT father, her choice of Cambridge as the locale, which, with Harvard also towering over it is really so alluring for anyone with academic ideals...... I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture.
But the fact remains that all these points notwithstanding her work is also of the highest quality. She is at her best not in the novel but in the two collections of short stories, and remember, she got the prize for Interpreter, not Namesake. Interpreter was a top notch first effort for its delicacy, the powers of observation it attests to, its command over the slow rhythms of daily life, its unblinking realism, its affectionate yet ironical tone, and its mastery of the language. The Namesake seriously disappointed in comparison, but I couldn't put down Unaccustomed Earth. I took it with me on the way to a conference and though I was reading a paper the next day, read it through till 3 a.m.
Also, I don't believe that experience which is geographically "limited" limits one as an author even in - particularly in - this globalized world; the local, the small, are becoming important again. The point is to be true to the experience one uses as base material and to present it as aesthetically as possible in telling one's story. OK, she writes about diasporic Bengalis, but she's also assessing/judging, however kindly, many of their values with an open, liberal, and well read mind.
I'll say this of Arundhati Roy too: like Lahiri, young and pretty and articulate, a whole lot of other political reasons again, but those shouldnt detract from either author's very real talents.
C
