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    The Lowland: A Novel
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    The Lowland: A Novel
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    The Lowland: A Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Lowland: A Novel

    Written by Jhumpa Lahiri

    Narrated by Sunil Malhotra

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    National Book Award Finalist

    Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary new novel, set in both India and America, that expands the scope and range of one of our most dazzling storytellers: a tale of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death.

    Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up.  But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan-charismatic and impulsive-finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America.

    But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he goes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind-including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife.

    Masterly suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland is a work of great beauty and complex emotion; an engrossing family saga and a story steeped in history that spans generations and geographies with seamless authenticity. It is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 24, 2013
    ISBN9780739341827
    Unavailable
    The Lowland: A Novel
    Author

    Jhumpa Lahiri

    Jhumpa Lahiri has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but is currently teaching in New York. She has published her fiction in various US journals including the New Yorker, and has won several US prizes for her work.

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    Reviews for The Lowland

    4/5

    915 ratings103 reviews

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    • 4/5
      (Fiction, Indian, Literary)The Lowland is the story of two brothers who grow up in a village in India. Ones moves to America, the other stays in his home village.I found that, although this told a story with a powerful ending and was well-written, it dragged for me in spots.4 stars
    • 4/5
      This was a story of a multi generational Indian family whose lives revolve around the loss of one of their sons. It is sad but very well written. The author describes the scenes with such detail that you feel you can see, smell and hear the places where the characters interact. There were just a hand full of characters in the story and some of them were very difficult to like but that always makes for a good read. It is a depressing story but still enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      This is a beautifully written, very sad novel. No one, it seems, can connect with any other person, no one can live a fulfilling life. Fair enough, but at the end Lahiri sort of wraps up things in a way that seemed hurried and some what contrived to me, hence three rather than four stars. It just occurred to me that this is a sort of response to E.M. Forster.
    • 4/5
      It took me awhile to get into this novel but half way through I started to enjoy the story of Indian culture and politics and family. Started to enjoy it when Subhash marries Gauri, his brother's widow who is pregnant and bring her to Rhode Island. Gauri is a unpleasant, selfish character who I never liked. Her daughter Bela's story is a sad one but very interesting how she grows and what she makes of herself. Enjoyed her story very much. Novel is well written I just had trouble focusing on political and philosphical details.
    • 3/5
      This novel took me forever to read. I started with the audiobook on May 5, but couldn't get into it. Then I got the paper book thinking that maybe that would grab me better, but still I labored. The writing is beautiful, spare, poignant in its simplicity, but before I was fifty pages in, I decided to quit reading. I set the book on the kitchen table, and "Pulitzer Prize" glared up at me from the cover, so I made myself open the book again and keep going.Despite the writing, despite the characters so realistically flawed, despite the kind of pacing that I usually love, which allows me to luxuriate in the language, the book remained a slog for me until the last page. Maybe the plot is just too much like real life: slow and accidental, full of poor choices and in the end meaningless, or at least pointless.The "Pulitzer Prize" written on the cover on its own wouldn't have carried me through the novel. Four sentences (or two sentences and two fragments) a little more than a hundred pages in gave me the boost necessary to keep me reading:"Though he looked like any other Bengali he felt an allegiance with the foreigners now. He shared with them a knowledge of elsewhere. Another life to go back to. The ability to leave." (113)Although my life experiences are dramatically different from Subhash's, I could relate to the experience of being in a place where so many others feel at home, surrounded by people for whom the possibility of living anywhere else simply doesn't exist. For me, the possibility of leaving the place where I am is not only a possibility; it seems almost an inevitability. But since I'm not at home where I am anyway and never have been, this brings me comfort. It's the prospect of staying in one place that's unsettling to me.I know this isn't quite what Subhash is feeling in this moment. He's not a perpetual stranger but rather has returned home a stranger because circumstances have cut him loose from the bonds that held him to that place, to those people. Even though the situation was different, those sentences spoke to me nevertheless and kept me reading.However, the promise of those sentences was never realized for me. I don't regret reading the whole novel, but I probably could have stopped at any point and been no worse off.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful, beautiful novel.
    • 5/5
      This book provides a brief description of the Naxalite Movement.
    • 5/5
      The novel started slowly, setting the scene for people like me who know nothing of Indian politics. But 300 pages later it reached a level of personal engagement and emotional impact that I did not imagine.
    • 5/5
      I love her restrained but still beautiful style in this book, and the way that almost every sentence moves the plot forward to elegantly. The story includes just enough historical background to make it interesting without bogging down the plot. I think this is her best book.
    • 5/5
      Probably the best novel I've read all year. (Dec 2014)
    • 2/5
      historic fiction. It was ok but would take a while to settle into every time I picked up the book. That doesn't work out too well when you only have spare minutes here and there to read.
    • 4/5
      Loved this, although it had one of those endings that is bittersweet.
    • 3/5
      I loved this book for the first two thirds. Having just had my own child, reading about Gauir's experience with Bela was both fascinating and heart breaking. But then I felt like the story sped up too much and at the same time drilled into characters and storylines that I had much less invested in. I found myself wanting to page forward to get back to the characters I cared about, and then being disappoint by the brevity of those sections.
    • 3/5
      It’s been ages since I’ve read anything by Lahiri and here I am reading two of her books in one month, thanks to the Reading Women Challenge.Lahiri’s writing is always gorgeous. I love her way with words. But I felt that The Lowland, while sweeping and beautiful, and well-researched (part of it is revolves around the Naxalite movement in Calcutta in the 1960s), felt rather cold. It was hard to feel hard for any of the characters, who seemed a bit one-dimensional.
    • 5/5
      I've loved everything Ms Lahiri has published and this was no exception. I've complained recently about books that felt 'first novel-ly' and this was the antithesis of that. Well-crafted, superbly told simply the best that modern fiction has to offer the reader for pleasure.
    • 3/5
      I am a fan of Lahiri and have read all her books. The Lowland was beautifully written and I was drawn into the story at the start. However, the most interesting part of the book occurs in first 100 pages. The rest of the book feels like an extended epilogue with occasional snippets filing in the gaps of the earlier story.

      Still her writing is so compelling, I couldn't put the book down.
    • 5/5
      So fucking good. Beautifully written, Lahiri tells a great story without getting in the way.
      I'm not usually a fan of switching POVs and big time jumps in novels, but she handles it with grace. Making connections between times and people without slapping you in the face with it.

      A great read. Emotionally affecting without getting maudlin.

      Also it started out all man-centric, but oh, what a red herring that was.
    • 4/5
      This sweeping family saga begins with two brothers growing up in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s. Of the two brothers, Subhash was older than Udayan by fifteen months, and they were quite different from one another - mirror images, it was said. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, each felt completed by the other. They were inseparable until college, when they studied at different universities, and Udayan became caught up in the radical Naxalbari movement. (You can read more about this particular branch of class war in India that erupted in 1967 in this New York Times article.)Udayan dies shortly after the book begins, but he remains the focus of all the other characters. One might even say this book is about the people in Udayan’s life who never got over his loss, and how it affected all of them.Subhash had gone to Rhode Island for his Ph.D., but when he found out about Udayan’s death he came home for the funeral. Udayan left a young widow, Gauri, who, unbeknownst to Udayan, was carrying his child. Subhash decides the best thing for all of them would be for him to take Gauri back with him to Rhode Island, marry her, and raise the child as his own. Maybe she would even come to love him in time. After all, most marriages were arranged anyway.Gauri has a girl, Bela, but it is Subhash who is the parent most devoted to her. Over the next forty years, we follow the lives of the three of them; their families back in Calcutta; and a few of the people they get to know in America. By the end of the novel, the back stories get resolved, and the characters seem ready at last to carve out a future apart from Udayan’s legacy.Discussion: The author is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and this book has won accolades as well, but I wasn’t enamored of it. The tone is flat and depressing, although without doubt Lahiri is quite adept at conjuring places and distilling moods, in prose that resonates to the ear:"In the afternoons, following mornings of bright sun, came the rumble of thunder, like great sheets of rippling tin. … From the terrace [she] watched the thin trunks of palm trees bending but not breaking in the maritime wind. The pointed foliage flapped like the feathers of giant birds, like battered windmills that churned the sky.”I never felt connected to any of the characters. Even Subhash, the most sympathetic of them, is a mystery; we get no sense of his interior life. He grew up as “the quiet one” and remains so; who is he and what does he care about when he is not engaging with his daughter Bela? We never really know. He is even detached from Bela: in spite of all the time they spend together, he doesn’t know who she is at all or what she wants, and he is unwilling to “impose” on her in order to find out. His superficial relationship with Bela is somewhat understandable from the plot, but it doesn’t help us develop empathy for either of them. Gauri too, remains a mystery, which does her no favors with the reader since she is such an unlikable character. Evaluation: This book provides a detailed picture of the recent political and social changes in India, particularly in Calcutta. I wasn’t as satisfied with the portraits of the characters, however, but can’t deny the author’s ability to fashion elegant prose.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this book and loved how simple yet well told the story was. Sad for sure and Gauri was a very hard character to stomach, but that's life and it isn't always fair and easy unfortunately.
    • 5/5
      An excellently told story about two brothers, one of whom was killed as a result of his involvement in Maoist uprisings in India. The story is about how that involvement impacted the lives of all of those around him through the decades.
    • 5/5
      This book was at once so compelling yet emotionally very difficult to read. The story is almost universal in its truths. Stirring up many emotions, although Lahiri's writing is not emotional or overwrought at all.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Writing was exquisite--not a word wasted and each cut to the heart of what the author intended to convey: a bleak, sad story of two loving brothers from India--Udayan a political activist and Subhash not--and the their lives and those of further generations. Each makes a bold decision that leads to tragic consequences. In the case of one, death for his youthful ideals, and for Subhash, his marriage of to Udayan's pregnant widow. Subhash and his wife settle in the States and they endure a lifeless, cold marriage, where he raises her daughter, Bela, to adulthood. After a couple of generations, the characters can't let go of the anger, bitterness, and resentments eating at them and affecting the daughter, Bela. The story comes full circle, from India to Rhode Island, back to India, and finally a ray of hope for Subhash in Ireland. I felt at times the story was too emotional and the author was pulling my heartstrings on purpose. Even so, she is a master of her craft.
    • 5/5
      The Lowland is so beautifully written. The prose--clean but very descriptive--had a rhythm that pulled me into the narrative. Really it's a story of a ghost. Two brothers, close in age, close-knit but different in most ways. Udayan is bold and adventurous while Subhash is thoughtful, careful, and pragmatic. Their divergent views take them on different paths, Udayan as a university student/political activist in the burgeoning Communist Party, part of India's relatively unknown Naxalite movement, and Subhash going to America to study, dismissing Udayan's activism as ill-conceived and pointless. Udayan is killed, leaving a young widow behind. Subhash convinces her to come to America with him, adopting his brother's child as his own. Not told in a linear fashion, the story jumps forward and backward in time, also shifting point of view and sometimes told in present tense.

      It is a story of regrets and consequences so artfully told, as a reader it felt like I was part of something special.
    • 4/5
      This Man Booker shortlisted book is a very enjoyable read. It follows the life of an Indian boy/man who grows up in Tollygunge, then travels to the US and spends the rest of his life there. Although it is sometimes claimed to be a book about brothers, because his relationship with his brother is key, I thought it was so much more than that. As well as the brothers, Gauri and Bela are also important characters, and to me, the book is a story about how different people can be, and how in a way they can't escape who they are, even if they try. I found it very sad, beautifully written and evokative. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      A poetic novel about the lives of two very opposite people. These are two of the most memorable characters I have read in fiction in some time. One is characterized by his generosity and the other is characterized by her selfishness. Although the author gives her excuses for her life decisions I just don't really think that they are enough. The book revolves around an Indian man who marries his sister in law after his brother's untimely death and the raising of a child conceived before his brother died. Very complex and thought provoking.
    • 3/5
      As I started to read this book, I didn't think I was going to like it. The characters seemed so blank, so disinterested in their surroundings, so unwilling to say what they were really thinking and feeling. They float through their lives, occasionally making momentous decisions that never really live up to their promise. There was nothing particularly to grab onto with any of them, nothing that made me warm to them or want to root for them as life happened around them. The book is a sequence of events, sometimes recounted in a linear way, sometimes using flashbacks and multicharacter perspective. It never really gets going, it jumps around too much, and doesn't have anything striking to say. Despite beginning at a time of civil unrest in India, despite portraying the lives of a fragmented family. And yet, by the end of the book I didn't want it to end. I'd spent everyday time with the characters and they felt like neighbours I might nod to in the street. Nobody I would sit down with for a cup of tea and a chat, but people I would miss seeing around. The final chapter, told from the perspective of the character I was most interested in, but who doesn't really get a voice in the rest of the novel, was sad. All of that, and for what, he seemed to be saying. I didn't know, either.
    • 4/5
      A poignant story of two brothers who follow differing paths in life, and the consequences of their choices. As always, Lahiri creates memorable characters and takes the reader on a lifetime journey of their psyches. The themes include family, love, loyalty, and the anger which accompanies grief. A lovely, bittersweet tale!
    • 5/5
      I have heard some say that Lahiri can do better than this, if that is true then I simply must pick up whatever other book is the better one, if only to prove to myself that they are wrong. Trying to pick out the best parts of the book from any of the others was nearly impossible, her writing style is striking from the very beginning and continues on the same level all the way to the end. The characters are people, just like anyone else, who make mistakes, who suffer in love and in family relationships, who make terrible decisions and pay the consequences for their actions. I honestly felt that I had lived the story more than I had read what was happening somewhere in a fictional reality. There is no question in my mind that this book should find itself on multiple award lists. I am only surprised it didn't end up winning most of them. Lowland was a very enjoyable read and I would happily pick up more books from this author.
    • 3/5
      Title - The LowlandAuthor - Jhumpa LahiriSource - Scottsdale Public LibrarySummary - Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, grow up in Calcutta, during the 1960s, a time of strife and turmoil. Children of what was considered an ordinary family, they were none the less well educated with great aspirations of success from their parents. Inseparable, they still grew to be very different. The brothers took different paths in their ideology until the time came that set both their paths on a collision course.Subhash was the ideal child, a good student, strong in his desire to please his parents. Udayan was different. His education only served to show him the difference between the classes in his country and how the regime oppressed those who thought differently. His was an ideology of anarchy."...In spite of the unrest, encouraged by professors, both brothers began postgraduate studies, Udayan at Calcutta University, Subhash continuing on at Jadavpur. They were expected to fulfill their potential, to support their parents one day..."Subhash eventually leaves to America to further his studies as Udayan stays behind. The distance strains the brothers as they can only contact each other through letters. America opens Subhash's eyes to a world far beyond the India he left behind and the battle for revolution and change Udayan was fighting for seemed very far away.The letters tell Subhash of a marriage. A union his parents oppose but Udayan doesn't care. Then there is a pregnancy and then a finally a telegram from his parents."...Udayan killed. Come back if you can..."Subhash returns to India. To his parents who are crushed by the loss of Udayan. To the young pregnant wife of his brother, Gauri. To the truth that his brother was killed by the police.He also finds Gauri a virtual prisoner in his parents' home. Locked away, not aloud to take meals with the family, forced into solitude. Subhash makes a desperate decision. He marries Gauri, his brother's widow and takes her to America. To raise the child of his brother as his own.A decision that changes his world forever. His parents stand against him and he must accept their anger and Gauri is not the quiet little widow he first thought she was. In the ensuing years, both will make decisions as one imprisons himself in a marriage and a life he had no concept of the degree of loneliness it would bring him. And the other, breaking free of the bonds that hold her to find her own life. But the cost of her acts will cause pain for all.Review - It took me a really long time to read this book. The first hundred pages or so moved quite slowly and though they were necessary to set up the rest of the novel, they lacked pace and interest. The characters of the brothers are wooden, caricatures of what we think Indian young men to be. The good son. A good student with potential and drive to succeed but utterly miserable. The rebel son. An anarchist shouting revolutionary slogans and propaganda until his one act does far more harm than good. An act he can never come back from. The parents could have been cut out of any B movie or TV show. People trapped by their own society's convention and expectations. But perhaps that is the intent with them.The novel does not truly pick up steam until Gauri takes over the narrative when she reaches America, the wife of her dead husband's brother. In America she begins to believe she has her own potential separate from what is allowed to her by her husbands. For once she may have her own freedom despite the child growing within her. Even when the child is born, Bella, she still fights for her freedom. Even abandoning the child alone in the home just so she can go for a ten minute walk. Just so she can have a moment to call her own. Eventually those moments are not enough and Gauri does the unthinkable. An offense unpardonable by either culture. How Subhash and Gauri and Bella deal with Gauri's act is the main theme of the rest of the novel. And there is where the novel is at its strongest.So if you pick it up and it seems to drag some in the beginning, stick with it, it does get good. But for me, it simply does not get good enough to make up for the slow start.A good read but not worth all the hype.
    • 5/5
      You just can't go wrong with Jhumpa Lahiri books. I first read bad reviews of The Lowland, but they compared it to her short stories. Her short stories are so phenomenal that it is an unfair comparison. Unaccustomed Earth has to be one of the best books I've ever read, and I usually have a rough time with short stories. If this novel came from any other writer it would be praised with amazing reviews.Once again her descriptions of India and the United States will transport you to the settings. The characters are complex and very real. As always I look forward to her next book.