Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Book 4 in Cannonball Read 2
I will just get one thing out of the way before I start: short stories are not my thing. I mean that a. they are not a favorite genre, so even the most well-crafted collection does not inspire the same personal reaction as a novel that has the same level of craft (though I can and do appreciate individual stories at a higher level), and b. I am not good at talking about/writing about short story collections. In fact, I have a suspicion that I am complete shit at it. So, here goes my very uninformed attempt at conveying my thoughts on Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies.
Interpreter of Maladies is pretty amazing. Each story creates its own world, and lets you know a great amount about the characters in a small amount of time. You can picture the characters, the settings, and the actions perfectly. You understand the actions and feelings of the characters.
Lahiri’s stories are mostly about Indian immigrants in the U.S. Some of the characters moved to the U.S. in their lifetime, some of them are the children of immigrants. Like Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies explores the meaning of identity, ethnicity and culture in the U.S. Sometimes these issues are in the foreground, sometimes they are only background; in all of the stories, the subject is difficulty in relationship and communication.
The first and last stories - ‘A Temporary Matter’ and ‘The Third and Final Continent’ - were probably my favorites. ‘A Temporary Matter’ is about a young married couple who have grown apart since the wife miscarried. The bulk of the story takes place during a series of power outages, as each night they confide secrets to each other. The sadness and longing in the story is palpable, and Lahiri uses the concrete details of meals - both the food prepared and the physical setting - to give the story a sense of place, something that happens frequently in the stories that make up Interpreter of Maladies (and in The Namesake as well). The story is told from the husband’s perspective, and he - at first - interprets this confessions by candlelight as a sign that their relationship is on the mend; however, after the power outages are over, his wife tells him she is filing for a divorce. Lahiri gracefully shows how the secrets are not the kind that bonds them together, but the kind that reveal how far apart they now stand.
In ‘The Third and Final Continent’, a young Indian man moves into a boarding house in Boston to prepare for his wife’s arrival. The story details the strange house he lives in, with a well-meaning but elderly and increasingly infirm landlord, Ms. Croft. He develops a friendship with her, but moves out when his wife arrives after six weeks. At first, he does not like her very much (they only know each other from the wedding in India). When he takes her to meet Ms. Croft, the events that transpire are the beginning of the two warming to each other and falling in love.
The stories in Interpreter of Maladies are graceful and often melancholy. Lahiri gives a full picture, such that I can look back on each title and remember the main characters, and even specific images or interactions from the story. Maybe good short stories for me are like obscenity for Potter Stewart: I can’t define them, but I know them when I see them.