Interpreter of Maladies

Rating:
Summary: This book broke my heart!
Review: I had been looking forward to reading Jhumpa Lahiri's book since the first time she was published in the New Yorker. I can now say, with absolutely no reservation, that Interpreter of Maladies is one of the best books I have read in years. Lahiri's stories have a poignancy that cannot be explained- only felt. "The Third and Final Continent" simply blew me away. I recommed this book to anyone who wants to read beautiful complex stories which make you think, but more importantly make you feel.

Rating:
Summary: a stunning debut!
Review: I had gotten the book at the launch party and by the next morning before work, I had finished it! Her writing is on the mark and her insights are simply exquisite. Each narrative is beautifully drawn out; each one a gem of detail and nuance. The first story, a standout, "A Temporary Matter" will haunt you for a long time.

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Summary: My favorite stories EVERin the New Yorker are Jumpa Lahiri's
Review: The best stories I've ever read in The New Yorker have been Jumpa Lahiri's. They mix subversive little details with ordinary life in a way that makes me melancholy in just the right way.

Imagine my surprise to learn that my best friend went to high school in South Kingstown with Jumpa and his mother wanted him to marry her! (do not know what Jumpa thought of this).

I am very much looking forward to reading more of Jumpa's stories.

Rating:
Summary: This book shows a lot of promise.
Review: Frankly, I bought the book because of the author's name. However, the stories were beautifully crafted and rich with detail. Most of the stories are memorable. Two were unforgettable.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Collection of Stories
Review: These stories are, without exception, absorbing and beautifully written. The authors insights are fascinating, and the stories never take the easy way out. I'm looking forward to reading more by Ms Lahiri!

Rating:
Summary: Eagerly awaiting
Review: I have read two of Ms Lahiri's short stories in the New Yorker. They were wonderful and I eagerly await her book "Interpreter of Maladies"

Rating:
Summary: Give Her a Chance
Review: I have never been a great fan of the short story, or of collections of short stories. No matter how much I like an author's work, his or her short story collections are inevitably the hardest for me to get through. I think this has more to do with expectations and momentum than actual content. I expect myself to finish every story I start before I stop reading, and that makes me put pressure on myself-but isn't that the idea of a short story, that you read it in a single sitting? As far as momentum, once I do finish a single story, there's nothing familiar waiting when I turn the page to the next one-it's a whole new world I need to learn, and for me the hardest part of reading a book is starting, so a short story collection presents me with my least favorite part of reading over and over again. Alas...

Jhumpa Lahiri made it easy for me to forget about my issues with short stories. Her debut collection, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000, has several themes that bind the stories together, and her talent for letting each story unfold is remarkable. I read the first story, "A Temporary Matter," at 5 AM on an airplane, and it was only the fact that I was sitting next to a stoic Canadian man that prevented me from crying at the end. In 20 pages Lahiri made me care about the couple in the story, made me understand their entire past, the tragedies they had survived, and the pain that they now sought to escape and put behind them. The ending, like the ending to each story in the collection, could go either way, but none of the surprises that arrive toward the end of a tale feel forced; they flow almost inevitably from the story, no matter how unlikely they seem until you read them.

There is not a bad story in this collection. At only 200 pages it presents a week's worth of nightly reading. As you may guess from the author's name, all of the stories feature aspects of life in India or as an Indian living in America, particularly the East Coast. They are windows on a culture that is a quiet presence in Chicago and across most of the nation, a culture that we do not often see into as deeply as Lahiri allows us to in this work.

Rating:
Summary: Highly-seasoned stories.
Review: I arrived at this Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection of nine short stories after first reading a couple of them in "The New Yorker" magazine. Lahiri's stories are seasoned with Indian spices. Her characters are both interesting and real. For instance, in the opening story, "A Temporary Matter," we meet a married couple who have become "experts at avoiding each other" (p. 4) as their marriage crumbles, sharing secrets and weeping together in their dark house. In "Mr. Pirzada," we find the narrator carving a Halloween pumpkin while India and Pakistan grow closer to war. The girl tells us, "I prayed that Mr. Pirzada's family was safe and sound," while pretending to brush her teeth, "for I feared that I would somehow rinse the prayer out as well" (p. 32).

"I could tell you stories," one character confesses in the book's darkly moving title story (p. 63), "a woman not yet thirty, who loved neither her husband nor her children, who had already fallen out of love with life" (p. 66). In another story, "Mrs. Sen's," we meet a "responsible and kind" professor's wife learning to drive so that "everything will improve" (p. 119) in her new American life, and so that she may drive herself to the market to purchase "a whole fish." She dreams of maybe even driving all the way back to Calcutta, "ten thousand miles, at fifty miles per hour" (p. 119).

Lahiri feeds her characters well by serving up page after page of exotic Indian food, and lots of it: peppers marinated with rosemary, boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes (p. 7), "bright paprika stew" (p. 10), shrimp malai (p. 20), fried spinach with radishes, pickled mangoes (p. 25), "lentils with fried onions, green beans with coconut, fish cooked with raisins in a yogurt sauce" (p. 30), "tortes of pesto and mascarpone cheese" (p. 93), purple eggplant, and stew with fish and green bananas (p. 133). Some stories here are stronger than others. But as a collection, you won't go away from Jhumpa Lahiri's book hungry for good fiction. "Splendid!"

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant prose
Review: The "Dr. Pirzadeh" story is the best of this collection; it tells the story of the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence from Pakistan from the perspective of an emigrant listening to the news in the evenings. Very touching. The other stories are all very well told.

Rating:
Summary: An accessible Pulitzer
Review: Even readers who don't normally take time for serious fiction will find this book of short stories moving and memorable. The first story alone, with its unexpected ending, is worth buying your own copy for. Like the characters themselves, the stories span continents from India to the United States. For Americans the stories provide greater insight into the immigrant experience, which is an integral part of the United States but usually submerged in its popular culture. For immigrants and children of immigrants, the stories provide characters and situations they can identify with. Enough said, just read it.