I can officially attest that Interpreter of Maladies more than merits the rave, rapturous reviews printed on the back–this is a stunning success from I can officially attest that Interpreter of Maladies more than merits the rave, rapturous reviews printed on the back–this is a stunning success from Jhumpa Lahiri.
In Lahiri’s rich, delicate, precise voice, the miniature stories in this collection tingle on the skin. They are moving, disquieting, and, in some cases, brutally devastating. How Lahiri manages to atomize these incredibly full, dense lives into short form, moving her characters around Boston and Bengal with the ease of a fish through waves—I don’t know. What I do know is that one does not so much read this collection as live in it.
Lahiri writes in language that is alive and unexpected. My initial guesses at what was coming continuously went through some rather severe adjustments. Lahiri was, I quickly learned, always just one step ahead. Yet, at the same time, each unexpected outcome somehow also felt inevitable: the characters in these stories seem to carve out their own patterns, impervious to the shape of the narrative. I never knew where each story was going, and that too felt like life.
There are nine disparate stories in this collection. Together, they form a complete, cohesive, emotionally legible whole. They are stories about loss, exile, and dispersion, and, in any such stories, they are also about love. In tragic, lyrical strains, Lahiri expresses the transient, exilic intimacy that emerges from shared uprootedness and promises to dull the habitual estrangement of everyday life. Against the background of a foreign, sometimes less than caring world, the characters in these stories stretch themselves to reach for one another and hope for understanding. But the attachments they form are not always easy or uncomplicated. This kind of diasporic intimacy is fragile, fraught, and haunted by dreams of home and homeland. It cannot retrieve the past, nor can it anesthetize against the pain of displacement, and in most cases, it cannot last forever. Yet, as Lahiri shows us, the transient, imperfect quality of these pockets of intimacy does not diminish the power of the characters’ encounters and collisions with one another: in the intricacy that transforms stories into histories, we are, in some impossible-to-measure way, always already intertwined.
Perhaps that is why “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” “Mrs. Sen’s,” and “The Third and Final Continent” are the stories I return to the most. They are stories about the people who pass through our lives like a vision, but nevertheless leave indelible traces. People whose presence makes it easier to not only endure but inhabit our experiences of exile. Each story trails off into afterimages of a closeness that can no longer exist, an intimacy that was always already forfeit—and each ending stole my breath.
I loved Interpreter of Maladies, and I am convinced that an encounter with one of these stories will not leave you unchanged....more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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Books:
short-fiction
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