BOOK REVIEW: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri 

Source :  Sri Lankan Group of Radio 4EB is pleased to present its Newsletter “Dæhæna” for August 2022.

The migrant experience is at the heart of all Jhumpa Lahiri stories where the reader follows the journey of immigrants as they establish themselves in a foreign place. In Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri’s second novel The Lowland, the movement is not simply through space but also through time.

The Lowland is a story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, growing up in postpartition Calcutta. A mere 15 months apart in age, Subhash has no memory of life without Udayan.

Inseparable, they find joy in fixing radios, listening to football matches, learning Morse Code, and looking out for each other as they get up to mischief, though Subhash often feels controlled by his younger brother.

When they leave home for university, their ideologies are challenged: Udayan’s fiery personality draws him to the Naxalite movement wanting to bring about social change. The cautious Subhash, interested in further education, leaves for graduate studies in Rhode Island,

where he is isolated, but at last feels free of his brother’s influence. While their lives drift apart, they continue to be tied to each other, like the twin ponds behind their childhood home which overflow and come together in the monsoon until there is but one big pool that mingles with the lowland. However, this connection is riddled with confusion, of emotions and misdirection.

In this tangled confusion, upon learning of Udayan’s death by the hands of the paramilitary (which is violently cracking down on the communist insurgence), Subhash marries Udayan’s widow Gauri who is pregnant, and takes her away to America. There, he raises Udayan’s daughter Bela as his own, doting on her and showering her with all the love and attention his marriage lacks.

Gauri, haunted by witnessing Udayan’s execution, her grief, her “anger at him for bringing her happiness, and then taking it away” and the guilt of a devastating secret “what she’d done for him, because he’d asked”, burrows herself deep into academic pursuits.

Gauri attempts to escape the crushing duty of being married to a man she does not love and mother to a child whom the man she loved never intended to have:

“I can’t become a father, Gauri… Not after what I’ve done.”

“What have you done?”, the answer to which is revealed in the last chapters of this epic saga.

With a story spanning generations, continents and political upheaval,The Lowland is epic in scope. But Lahiri expertly creates an intimate story of time and memory, the storyline progressing chronologically, with each of the main characters dipping into memory to understand their present.

Lahiri dishes up melancholia in beautiful prose. While the tone is muted, the language is subtle and confessional and in that lies the beauty of this extraordinary tale of brotherly love, family obligations, marital compromises, and the impact of history on individuals, of how the choices we make and the secrets we keep echo across place and time.

Nimandra Gunasekera
Nimandra works in the oil and gas industry, enjoys reading
and dabbling in a bit of writing.