Culture Watch

Page Two

Norwegian writer Karin Fossum’s page turner, The Indian Bride, examines community, marriage, and murder in the small village of Elvestad where locals keep abreast of dating, divorce, and farm sales at Einar’s Café. In Fossum’s hands Elvestad simultaneously evokes rural innocence and hidden sins.

As The Indian Bride begins, 51 year old bachelor farm machine salesman Gunder Jomann, an Elvestad local, has made the extraordinary decision to find himself a wife in India. A dreamer, for months he has gazed at photographs in People of All Nations, fixated on images of beautiful Indian women. Gunder insists he does not want a subservient and self-sacrificing spouse, but rather, someone he can “cherish and adore.” Although long promised by his mother that “your time will come,” Gunder sees only a future of deep loneliness. Defying expectation, he books a flight to India where he finds Poona Bai.

Kossum’s genius resides in her ability to establish a believable relationship between Gunder and Poona, and to make the reader applaud their union despite the wide gulf of culture brought to it. Kossum moves the story back to Norway and develops a tale of murder and suspense special for its careful rendering of small town life.

Where Fossum mines the soul of a village, in Unaccustomed Earth (newly available in a paper edition) Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri digs deep into the hearts and minds of individual men and women, often Punjabi immigrants and their offspring, living in the United States. They are middle class people with professional identities, and they are often in crisis. There are no murders but there is plenty of suspense.

Increasingly, Lahiri writes about the second generation, people who have worked out economic but not emotional problems. Her characters are assimilated, or nearly so. Grandparents left behind in India have died; trips to the motherland have all but ceased. Still, questions of identity remain as mixed-ethnicity marriages unravel, and the emotional scars of being an “ethnic” schoolboy, an outsider, continue to be felt.

Lahiri’s work is notable for its toughness. Unlike an Alexander McCall Smith, she does not delight in her characters nor does she show particular sympathy for their plight. Rather, Lahiri makes significant demands of the men and women who inhabit these stories. She asks them to confront demons, hopeless infatuation, and loss, insisting that they move on with their lives and take responsibility. The resolution of a particular story is often precipitous, a sudden frappé, often after a lingering and haunting interrogation of mind and motive.

While Lahiri writes about Indian immigrants, in this volume she seems most interested in the more universal power of movement on relationship. She takes as her muse not a Bengali, but New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoting him at the beginning of her book: Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children…shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

These three volumes pose provocative questions about the costs, and fundamental necessity, of relationships. This shared concern has produced a literary triptych worthy of any summer reading list.

— Reviewed by Jill Norgren

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