Jhumpa Lahiri, who has been publishing stories in The New Yorker since 1998, has a new novel out this week, “The Lowland,” which tells the story of two Calcutta-born brothers during an attempted Maoist revolt, in the late nineteen-sixties. One of them eventually emigrates to the U.S., and part of the book is about his painful reckoning with the past as he tries to establish a new life.
During a visit to Lahiri’s house in Brooklyn (she currently lives full-time in Rome), we asked how she went about writing the book. She explained that “The Lowland” gestated for a decade before she attempted a draft. “You know, there’s this romantic notion that one sits down at one’s desk, and picks up a pen or opens the computer, and within a few months the novel is done.” For Lahiri, “it’s always been a series of fits and starts.” Recalling an interview with Samuel Beckett, who said that his aim was to write without a style, she talked about her struggle to achieve simplicity. “Even when I look back at my work, I feel frustrated, that it was too fussy. How many words do you really need to get your message across? I still feel that I have a ways to go before arriving at something that feels really … truly pure.”
But Lahiri also spoke about the pleasure of submitting to the forceful pull of narrative: when she sits down to write, she never knows exactly where the story will go. “It’s a very mysterious process.”
