In pleasant book news, the New York Public Library has acquired Jhumpa Lahiri’s archive.
The beloved multilingual translator and award-winning author’s papers will now be available to view in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, located in the basement below Fortitude and Patience’s paws. In that storied center, Lahiri’s work will share shelf space with Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters.
As Jennifer Wilson writes in this week’s New Yorker, Lahiri’s 31 boxes of personal material form an idiosyncratic portrait. Though her archive includes plenty of manuscripts, journals, and correspondence with esteemed peers like Elena Ferrante, Amy Tan, and Michael Cunningham, miscellany is also well-represented.
Future perusers can expect to find “school book reports, an Italian rail ticket with scribbled ideas for a novel, and a piece of fan mail from the director M. Night Shyamalan.”
The collection also includes juvenilia. Like drawings, doodles, early stories, and even a rare copy of Lahiri’s first (self-published) novel, The Life of a Weighing Scale. Though scholars should know she drafted the book at nine years old, most likely in a stolen journal.
As Wilson observed, as a mid-career writer Lahiri is on the young side for this sort of memorialization, which tends to smacks of lifetime achievement. But Berg Collection curator Carolyn Vega is enthusiastic about the acquisition.
As she told Library Journal, “Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing crisscrosses the borders of nations and languages, exploring essential themes of family and generational ties, immigration and belonging, and dislocation and connection.” Presumably, the resulting body of work is deep enough to satisfy a curious fan.
Though the simpler explanation may be that an urge to archive just runs in the family. Lahiri’s father was a librarian at the University of Rhode Island library. And Lahiri herself served a brief stint at the NYPL, staffing a research exhibit.
Find out for yourselves, New Yorkers—the archive will open to the public sometime later this year. Readers awaiting Lahiri’s next book ought to take a cue from the lions.
