From Mustich:
Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri (born 1967)
Indian Immigrants, Indelible Stories, Universal Truths
Jhumpa Lahiri—just thirty-two when this, her first book, was published—is a rare writer who has combined literary sophistication with commercial success. Interpreter of Maladies not only won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also spent weeks atop the bestseller charts; Unaccustomed Earth (2008), a subsequent collection, shot straight to number one when it was released nine years later—an almost unheard of feat for an author of short stories. Part of Lahiri’s appeal comes from her deft layering of substance and style: While she reckons with some of the most profound themes of contemporary global life, she does so in an unadorned voice whose effect recalls that of another great short story writer, Alice Munro. And just as Munro uses what may seem at first a small canvas of Canadian life to intuit the distant longings of the human heart, so—in Interpreter of Maladies, especially—Lahiri uses the displacements and transformations of America’s diverse population of Indian immigrants to illuminate the home truths of an increasingly unbounded world.
Her debut collection opens with “A Temporary Matter,” a quiet but haunting tale in which a young couple accustoms itself to hour-long nightly electricity cuts in their Boston neighborhood as they try to navigate the spaces that loss and heartbreak have insinuated between them. The title tale is a tour de force of fraught and comic culture clashes, revolving around an Indian American family and the local guide they ask to inform their sightseeing—and, as it turns out, something more than that—on a vacation in India. In “This Blessed House,” newlyweds who’ve moved into a new home in Hartford discover the many religious tchotchkes the previous owners have left behind. Although the bride wants to keep and display this diverting collection of Christian figurines, the husband believes they have no place in the pious Hindu household he envisions; the tension between new and old, the lightness of the moment and the weight of tradition, fuels a sort of screwball comedy that hurtles into unexpected emotional depths. And in “Mrs. Sen,” perhaps the most memorable story in Interpreter of Maladies, the wife of a math professor babysits a friend’s son and regales him with stories of her life in Calcutta, where she purchased her impressive collection of saris and regularly bought fresh fish at the markets that dot the city. In America, she longs for halibut and mackerel, but she cannot drive to the fishmonger, an emblem of the gulf that immigration has put between herself and her native habits.
Interpreter of Maladies is distinguished throughout by Lahiri’s sympathetic recognition of desires that are not quite up to their own fulfillment, of loves that are dislodged but nevertheless accommodated to new surroundings, of goodness that must make do with the indifferent destinies life has in store for it. Like uncanny and lasting benedictions, her haunting evocations of human frailty leave readers strangely heartened.
What: Short Stories.
When: 1999.
Award: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2000.
Also By: The Namesake (2003). The Lowland (2013).
Try: Selected Stories, 1968–1994 by Alice Munro. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Arranged Marriage by Chitra Banerjee Divakaru