Of Lahiris and Namesakes…

Am tired of Lahiri, her same old premises, and similar characters. And I've begun to notice that her stories all have a depressing undertone, and are extremely verbose. Where other authors beautifully express the predicament, situation or scene in 5-10 beautiful magical sentences, Lahiri takes an entire page for them, and they are still not awesome.

I might not be worthy of a reviewer to give such a rating to one of the most famous woman authors from Indian origin, but I am beginning to wonder how and why her stories get popular?
All of them are based on a Bengali couple living in the US, and are struggling to keep their children still in touch with their Bong routes, and the kids are doing everything in their might to shrug away from them, their cultures and their parents. And at the end of every story, the off-spring eventually realizes his/her roots and gets back to them.
Its like Lahiri is reading from her own life and experiences and is not doing anything to take the reader to a different place or time. And when this tone is repeated in each and every one of her books, I read Namesake and two stories from Unaccustomed Earth, and am done with her. After reading Namesake, and an excerpt from one of her other stories, I still wanted to give her a chance and see if there is something , something at all that might appeal to me in her books, but no... none at all.

Namesake also wasn't a great book too, in hindsight. And that was the only movie based on a book that I thought to be better than the book, and certainly the entire credit goes to the actors of the movie, and not the plot or the storyline. So in short, am done with Jhumpa Lahiri. I will not read any of her books unless of course, she wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

But yeah, in spite of all this, I am in half a mind to put myself through Interpreter of Maladies , though I don’t want to, and only will to know what the book is all about.