Its first part, in an initial printing of two thousand copies, sold out in two weeks. Yet “Little Women,” published in 1868-69, was a smash hit. We witness one death, and it is a solemn matter, but otherwise the book is pretty much a business of how the cat had kittens and somebody went skating and fell through the ice. These characters are not glamorous, and the events are mostly not of great moment. Jo catches him spying on them, and befriends him. Next door live a rich old man and his orphaned grandson, Laurie, who, when he is home from his Swiss boarding school, lurks behind the curtains to get a look at what the March sisters are up to. Their mother, whom they call Marmee, is with them, and the girls are always nuzzling up to her chair in order to draw on her bottomless fund of loving counsel.
The girls’ father is away from home, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of the family, and cute, so everybody loves her anyway. She collects cast-off dolls-dolls with no arms, dolls with their stuffing coming out-and nurses them in her doll hospital. Next comes Beth, thirteen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and doomed to die young. Jo writes plays that the girls perform, with false mustaches and paper swords, in the parlor. Then comes Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo: bookish and boyish, loud and wild. The eldest is Meg, beautiful, maternal, and mild. Everything was different, and I would have been different if I had been raised by those people.It is doubtful whether any novel has been more important to America’s female writers than Louisa May Alcott’s “ Little Women,” the story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the eighteen-sixties. They were completely different people they were laughing, they were joking, they had cousins and brothers and sisters, and they were completely relaxed. They were not the parents who raised me in America. And I saw different people I saw a different set of parents in Calcutta. Everything was suddenly dramatically different. I would see the almost instant transformation in her-in her face, in her body, in the way her voice was. I would see what would happen to my mother when she got off the airplane in Calcutta. Jhumpa Lahiri on being a child of immigrants… And it caused a lot of anxiety in me, in terms of who I was, in terms of-why could I not be bound up in what she wanted so desperately? Why did I, rather, represent the other world-the world of exile and of coldness, the world of nobody ever coming over without an invitation and the other million things about the United States that caused her to suffer? It was a shadow over my life because I couldn’t participate in it that world had nothing to do with me. And I recently wrote a short piece about this notion of nostalgia, and what I realized in writing the piece was that throughout my childhood, my mother’s nostalgia was a rival. Everything, everything about that life, was missing here. Place-for her roots, for her home, for her tribe, for her people, for the trees she would see and the birds she would hear. I am the child of parents, especially of a mother, who felt and continues to feel acute nostalgia. I certainly think I’m replaying something in my own family’s history. Without the weight, and yet, you carry sort of the best of it with you. In the way that so many writers have found freedom: by stepping away from the place, the people, the language, the culture that they knew, in search of something different, of their own making. I feel that this journey, this Italian journey that I’ve made, as a person, as a writer, is really about finding freedom. Liberty comes from renunciation we must renounce on a very deep level to feel that. That’s the beauty of it and the fascination of it and the frustration of it all. Having power, having authority, as a writer, what does that mean? I ask this question in my book: Can one call oneself an author without feeling authoritative? Can one feel authoritative without possessing something-possessing a language in my case? Which I don’t, you know-I don’t possess Italian, and that’s the whole game of it. In part two of Jhumpa Lahiri’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber, the two discuss the elusiveness of language, nostalgia, and being the child of immigrants.
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