Book lovers crowded inside the doors and sat in the aisles of MacMillan 117 Friday night as best-selling author Jhumpa Lahiri read from her latest short story collection and emphasized that, as a fiction writer, she does not believe in restricting herself to any one genre and enjoys writing both short stories and novels.
Raised in South Kingstown, Lahiri is the first woman of Indian descent to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - an award given for her debut collection of stories, "Interpreter of Maladies." She has also authored a novel called "The Namesake," which was recently made into a movie with the same name.
The Brown Bookstore organized the reading, selling nearly 200 copies of Lahiri's books at the event, wrote Tova Beiser, the bookstore's trade books and promotions manager, in an e-mail.
Lahiri, whose writing draws on her Indian origins and her New England upbringing, read an excerpt from a story in her newest book, "Unaccustomed Earth." Set in Massachusetts, the story, entitled "Once in a Lifetime," is the first in a trio of linked stories revolving around the lives of Hema and Kaushik, a girl and a boy, both of whose parents come from the Bengal region in India but who have different cultural sensibilities.
The title of the new book, Lahiri told the audience, is derived from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Custom-House," his introduction to "The Scarlet Letter."
When an audience member asked whether she follows a set path for crafting her stories, Lahiri said every story has a "different genesis."
"It's a matter of spending time thinking about the stories and almost meditating on them," she said. "It's a very slow - for me anyway - a slow, rather mysterious process."
In response to a question by Chintan Patel '08, the author said she likes to write both short stories and novels since the "tools" used to create them are the same.
"One works in sentences and one creates lives," she said. "It's exciting for me to be a fiction writer and relish all forms (of writing)."
One audience member lauded Lahiri's ability to "alternate references to New England and South Asia" in her narratives.
Lahiri, who is known for writing about the immigrant experience though she grew up in the United States herself, said "India is part of who I am. I hope to maintain some kind of tie to it."
But the audience's questions weren't restricted to Lahiri's writing.
Lahiri said she was "pleased" with the cinematic rendition of her novel, "The Namesake."
It was "beautifully made, intelligently and passionately and carefully rendered," she said in response to a question. The movie, directed by Mira Nair, featured Kal Penn of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" fame in the lead role of Gogol Ganguli, a Bengali boy born in the United States who struggles with his uncommon name and the challenges of being raised in differing, often opposing, cultures.
Speaking about the challenges of being a writer as well as a mother of two small children, Lahiri said she no longer finds time to write every day. But, she said, "I try to work when I can."
Some attendees reached the event after the doors had closed and could not be admitted. Lahiri signed 75 copies of "Unaccustomed Earth" before the reading for those who couldn't get into the event, Beiser wrote in an e-mail.
Several attendees praised Lahiri's writing for its sensitivity and simplicity.
"I think her description of characters is really excellent," said William Whelihan, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior. "Her prose is very clean, very engaging."
Whelihan's wife, Claire Whelihan said Lahiri "connects" even those readers who are not of Indian heritage to her characters.
"(My husband) thinks her writing is perfect," Whelihan added.
Peter van Erp, a Rhode Island School of Design alum and Providence resident, said, "It's fascinating how she can get in my head and write down what I would write if I could."
Van Erp said he can identify with Gogol's character in "The Namesake" because, like Gogol, he is an architect with an engineer father who was born in another country and moved to the United States.
Lahiri's mother, Tapati Lahiri, who sat next to her daughter during the book signing, said she finds it "hard" to decide which of Lahiri's books she likes best.
"They are all good to me," she said, adding that the story "Unaccustomed Earth," which shares the title of the book, is one of her favorites in the collection.
But one student said she felt that the piece Lahiri read did not convey the overall flavor of her writing.
Though Lahiri "does a really good job capturing the sense of foreignness ... I didn't get a sense of how (the piece she read) fit with the rest of her writing," said Eva Glieberman '08.
Glieberman said if she hadn't read Lahiri's work before, she would've missed the excerpt's "subtle intellectual and thematic points."
