I chanced upon this book review on the NYTimes, on Jhumpa Lahiri. I was initially drawn to the review because of her photo. I thought, this woman is really beautiful, then I found out that she’s the author of “The Namesake,” something that I have been dying to read/watch but haven’t found the time for.

Anyway, the book review of her latest collection of short stories “Unaccustomed Earth,” really piqued my interest. The main themes of the short stories, according to the review, revolve around finding one identity in whatever geographic location:

The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph, a metaphysical passage from “The Custom-House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” It’s an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America — the newcomers and their hyphenated children — struggle to build normal, secure lives. But Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne’s notion as test it. Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes?

As her characters mature in their new environments, they carry with them the potential for upheaval. Geography is no guarantee of security. Lahiri shows that people may be felled at any time by swift jabs of chance, wherever they happen to live. Uncontrollable events may assail them — accidents of fate, health or weather. More often, they suffer less dramatic reversals: failed love affairs, alcoholism, even simple passivity — the sort of troubles that seem avoidable to everyone except the person who succumbs to them. Like Laura, the well-meaning narrator of “Brief Encounter,” the men and women of Lahiri’s stories often find themselves overwhelmed by unexpected passions. They share her refrain: “I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” Again and again, the reader is caught off-guard by the accesses of emotion and experience that waylay Lahiri’s characters, despite their peregrinations, their precautions, their concealments.

I think it might be an interesting read. First off, if one has had a chance to live abroad, then one is confronted with questions about identity and self. I believe the question is further magnified because you get to spend time away from your home country and basically see yourself through a new society and through stranger’s eyes. Second, the way that the book reviewer wrote the review already drums it up to be something exotic and different, literature with a sense of purpose.

Interesting.