Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” - Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies
My rating
5 Stars
Author
Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher
Fourth Estate
Genre
Fiction/Short Stories
Number of Pages
224
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Summary
The Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories, some of them set in Boston while some others set in Calcutta. They are all stories about Indians settling abroad and reminiscing about their motherland. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.
My review
A Temporary Matter is about a couple who have lost their bond in marriage due to the loss of their baby. When Mr.Pirazda Came to Dine is about a Bangladeshi man, dining with an Indian family in Boston while watching news of the painful partition of the two countries. The titular story – Interpreter of maladies is set in India and is about a woman seeking solutions to her (mental) ailments from a man who works as an interpreter for a doctor for patients who cannot speak the language.
While A Real Durwan is about Boori a sweeper who is banished for no fault of hers and Sexy is about highlighting the reality of extra-marital affairs. Mrs. Sen is about an Indian woman abroad baby-sitting American kids for want of something to do.
And This Blessed House is about a newly married couple finding Catholic treasures in their newly bought house. The Treatment Of Bibi Haldar is the whackiest of all with that involves a mysterious disease and its even mysterious remedy. And the final one, The Third And Final Continent chronicles the journey of thousands of us who travel and settle in other continents among a new world, new lifestyles and make it big in the world.
Jhumpa Lahiri has the uncanny talent of converting everyday mundane stories to something relishing, mysterious, eloquent, humorous, in short, simply brilliant. She has such a unique voice and quality to her writing that you will feel touched by these moral stories.
Final verdict
This was the first book that I read, written by her, but it definitely won’t be the last.
Read This.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age.
In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005.
Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis.
She received the following awards, among others:
1999 - PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for Interpreter of Maladies;
2000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for Interpreter of Maladies;
2000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies
Author info and pic from Goodreads.
Top Quotes from Interpreter of Maladies
“Sexy means loving someone you do not know.”
“She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.”
“A woman who had fallen out of love with her life”
“It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months.”
“As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.”
“He learned not to mind the silences.”
“Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.”
“You got cats at home?"
"No cats. Only a husband.”
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