Page 302 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes Lahiri became an avid reader when she was a child, and she also began to write stories. At the age of
seven, she would coauthor with her classmates stories of up to ten pages in length.
After graduating from South Kingstown High School, Lahiri attended Barnard College, from which
she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English literature. Continuing her studies, she received
three master of arts degrees from Boston University, in English, creative writing, and comparative
studies in literature and the arts. She also obtained a doctoral degree from Boston University in
Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation was on the representations of Italian architecture in early
seventeenth-century English theater.
In the summer of 1997, while working on her dissertation, Lahiri worked as an intern for Boston
magazine. She had already begun writing short stories and had won the Henfield Prize from
Transatlantic Review in 1993 and the Louisville Review fiction prize in 1997. Her work at Boston magazine,
however, was limited to writing blurbs for consumer products.
Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design, but her
real ambition was to write fiction, a goal that received a major boost when the New Yorker published
three of her stories and named her one of the twenty best young writers in the United States. Her
collection of nine short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, including “This Blessed House,” was published
by Houghton Mifflin in 1999. It was an immediate success, winning the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in
2000, an impressive achievement for a young writer with her first book. The title story was awarded
the O. Henry Award in 1999.
Three years later, Houghton Mifflin published Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake, which she had begun
working on in 1997. The novel is about a family that moves from Calcutta to New York. One of the
main characters is a second-generation Indian American named Gogol who struggles to find his
place in the world. The novel received critical acclaim and was nominated for the 2003 Los Angeles
Times book award for fiction. It was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair.
Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias, an American-born journalist, in 2001, at a ceremony in Calcutta.
They have two children. In 2002, Lahiri received a Guggenheim fellowship. Since 2005, Lahiri has
served as vice president of the PEN American Center.

23.2 Detailed Study—This Blessed House

They Discovered the first one in a cupboard above the stove, beside an unopened bottle of malt
vinegar. “Guess what I found.” Twinkle walked into the living room, lined from end to end with
taped-up picking boxes, waving the vinegar in one hand and a white porcelain effigy of Christ,
roughly the same size as the vinegar bottle, in the other.
Sanjeev looked up. He was kneeling on the floor, marking, with ripped bits of a Post-it, patches on
the baseboard that needed to be retouched with paint.
“Throw it away.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
“But I can cook something with the vinegar. It’s brand-new.”
“You’ve never cooked anything with vinegar.”
“I’ll look something up. In one of those books we got for our wedding.”
Sanjeev turned back to the baseboard, to replace a Post-it scrap that had fallen to the floor, “Check the
expiration. And at the very least get rid of that idiotic statue.”
“But it could be worth something. Who knows?” She turned it upside down, then stroked, with her
index finger, the minuscule frozen folds of its robes. “It’s pretty.”
“We’re not Christian,” Sanjeev said. Lately he had begun noticing the need to state the obvious to
Twinkle. The day before he had to tell her that if she dragged her end of the bureau instead of lifting
it, the parquet floor, would scratch.

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