Years ago I read Jane Eyre for the sole purpose of reading Rhys’s retelling of it from the perspective of the woman locked in the attic. Luckily the book stands solidly on its own so my now hazy memories of Jane Eyre didn’t get in the way.

This critical edition includes all sorts of letters and essays and excerpts from Jane Eyre, which I only skimmed through but might come back to on a future reading. There are so many levels on which to appreciate this book: from Rhys’s interpretation of Ms Brontë to her firsthand knowledge of the post-colonial Caribbean islands most of the book is set around to the shifting narrative style.

This is the first book I’ve actually missed my subway stop while reading; I came close a few times with Valley of the Dolls but Wide Sargasso Sea obviously wins.

I love how this book describes a meandering journey that somehow always seems to stay in the same place as it progresses. Really, it’s two meandering journeys: in one, an old man and a young boy, refugees from Mozambique’s long civil war, seek refuge in a crashed and charred bus. While the duo never venture far from the bus, the landscape around them continually changes. In the other, one of the deceased passengers of that bus tells his story via the notebooks they found, which the boy reads to the man. While the writer of the notebooks describes ongoing traveling, he seems to keep finding the same people and places over and over wherever he goes. As both of these futile journeys progress, they begin to intertwine.

Overall it’s a pretty amazing narrative on the toll of war on every day life.

Do you weep for the present? Well, know that the days to come will be worse still. That’s why they made this war, to poison the womb of time, so that the present would give birth to monsters instead of hope … They have stolen so much from you that not even your dreams are your own, nothing of your land belongs to you, and even the sky and the seas will be the property of outsiders.

I have to admit I felt bored with the first part of this short story collection. Not really because the stories themselves were boring to me — Lahiri has a consistently elegant storytelling approach that I enjoy — but because the consistency itself pulls it down as a collection. It’s almost like each story arcs in such a similar fashion that they seem to be the same. Then most of the stories are centered around middle- to upper-middle-class, first- or second-generation Bengali-Americans, usually living in the Northeast US, so they kind of are the same.

But there are two parts to this book: the first is the group of stories that have nothing to do with each other (yet kind of feel like the same story) and second is three “stories” that comprise the tale of Hema and Kaushik. Even though this second part is not drastically different in subject matter, character type, or setting, it did feel like a break to me. The stories can’t really stand apart from each other, but they are distinct in voice alone. In the first Hema speaks to Kaushik, then Kaushik to Hema, and a good twenty years later they are brought back together unexpectedly. Lahiri seems to tap into something deeper here, even if many of the nagging consistencies are still there. It might just be letting the characters talk to each other that drew me in.

I poked through reviews, and it seems that a lot of people love this collection while there are also many disappointed in the lack of breadth. I can definitely see that perspective too, but Hema and Kaushik took me out on a high note.