Udayan stays to fight for his cause and defies his parents by bringing home a wife they do not approve of. Subhash heads to America to study away from the turmoil of his home. The house their parents have built, backs up to the lowlands, an area that floods and dries with the seasons. The brothers are raised in a middle class neighborhood on a narrow street with a mosque on the corner. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.” The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. “Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. When one of the brothers, Udayan, secretly becomes immersed in a political movement, I became slightly turned off by the subject matter but not the writing. It was a story like many I’ve read before about life in India, a culture that permeates every movement in life. I was not familiar with this author or her other award winning works, the Pulitzer prize in fact, but the storyline of inseparable brothers raised in Calcutta, India, who take opposite paths in their lives, captured my attention.Īt first I was unsure if I could stick with The Lowland. This is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers. Suspenseful and piercingly intimate, The Lowland is a masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return. 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.īut when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family’s home, he comes 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.

It is the 1960s and Udayan – charismatic and impulsive – finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement: he will risk all for what he believes. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead.

Theme: Duty and Desire, Heritage and Homeland, Secrets and Conspiracyīorn just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. Setting Place: Calcutta, West Bengal, India Rhode Island, USA Major Characters: Subhash Mitra, Gauri Mitra, Bela, Udayan, Holly, Richard Grifalcony

The lowland novel