Generosity is a strange novel. It starts brilliantly, with a routine creative fiction class taught by a harassed lecturer trying to escape his boring day job as an editor and attended by a hodgepodge of students including the gifted and strangely blissful Algerian immigrant, Thassa, who seems to enchant everyone she meets. In time, Thassa [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘immigrants’
September 23, 2009
Border Songs by Jim Lynch
Great book! With echoes of The Little Giant from Aberdeen County, Border Songs tells the story of a tall, dislexic, Asperger’s suffering border agent who lives with his parents, pines for the girl over the border in Canada, works as a border patrol agent, and lives to birdwatch, which brings him to out of the [...]
June 3, 2009
Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala
Leaving India tells the story of the Indian diaspora through the author’s extended family who, over the years, migrated from India to Fiji, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and the United States. That’s fascinating historical and personal material, but unfortunately written in a rather dry, stilted, and too often self-satisfied manner especially when it [...]
August 30, 2008
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of stories by the author of The Namesake(a great book) and reprises the theme of conflicts between immigrant parents and their children. I used to love short stories and I now find them frustrating: after getting attached to the characters it’s hard to let go and not wonder what happened [...]
August 2, 2008
The Boat by Nam Le
The Boat is a set of short stories by a young writer who made it a point to set each of them in a different continent — so much so that it feels like a overly-studied portfolio rather than a coherent whole. Many of the stories are very dark. How about a mother watching her son [...]
