Indeed, as a teenager, he leaves Calcutta and travels to Rhode Island to study maritime biology. This would make sense were it being presented from Subhash’s point of view. Unlike in say, “In the City by the Sea,” Kamila Shamsie’s debut novel about Karachi, the history here feels researched, rather than felt. It feels bizarre to read a novelist of such elegance writing sentences like, “In July the Central Government banned the carrying of bows and arrows in Naxalbari.” This is an understandable development, given the brothers’ differing personalities, but it causes a remarkably small amount of tension between them.Ī bigger problem is the way Lahiri crams a refresher course on the Naxalite movement into the novel. Udayan plunges headfirst into the movement Subhash remains on its periphery. The wedge in “The Lowland” is the Naxalite movement, the violent, eventually Maoist uprising that sprang out of West Bengal in the late 1960s. Like so many siblings, though, they grow apart as they grow up. Green in contrast to the blue of the sky.”Īs youth, Udayan and Subhash are like these two ponds: Together so much they are like one unit, Udayan’s bravery mixes with his brother’s diligence to produce, between the two, something better, and more beautiful, than either alone. “Its leaves caused the surface to appear solid. “The flooded plain was thick with water hyacinth,” Lahiri continues.
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