Jhumpa Lahiri

In nine stories imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, Lahiri charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.

Stories

Interpreter of Maladies

This exchange does not carry the same oomph it does without 11-year-old Eliot's internal reflections (replaced here with a [...] because it's too long to quote), but damn. Needed to bookmark this scene. It's tooooo good.

Lukas

"Eliot, if I began screaming right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come?"

"Nothing. I am only asking if someone would come."

"At home that is all you have to do. Not everybody has a telephone. But just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements."

[...] "They might call you," Eliot said eventually to Mrs. Sen. "But they might complain that you were making too much noise."

franz

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. 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. 

Mrs. Croft's was the first death I mourned in America, for hers was the first life I had admired; she had left this world at last, ancient and alone, never to return.

The first short story in the collection, A Temporary Matter, showcases Jhumpa Lahiri's mastery of subtle and consistent imagery, illustrating the fluctuations of Shoba and Shukumar's relationship with a visually-represented thru line of temporality. Adjusting the lid of a steaming saucepan can both capture the current tensions of the marriage and foreshadow the arc of the storyline. I also find the mundanity compelling. There is nothing spectacular about Shoba and Shukumar's marriage; it is about as exciting as you would expect from a middle class 30-somethings couple in late 20th century Boston, but Lahiri more than manages to embed flickering apprehension and uncertain anticipation in the narrative. Shoba and Shukumar both have the power to restore and destroy each other, and Lahiri keeps the reader's breath held through descriptions and dialogues that are both heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

I didn't give up on you. Now it's your turn.

Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise.

beautiful stories that make you think about humanity and connection

nattie

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.

i was only able to finish 3/4 of the book (i had like 3 short stories left) but yeah they were all actually really good, i might pick it up one day to finish them all

The fact that I'm rating this short story collection so highly should mean something to you, because everyone who knows me knows I usually cannot stand diaspora poetry (or prose, for that matter). My standards are high, but Jhumpa Lahiri went above and beyond. Her writing is accessible, but never shallow or corny. Subtle imagery is her strong suit, and it carries through every story in this book. If you notice it, it adds whole new layers of depth and poignancy to already rich plot lines.

Interpreter of Maladies is a series of tragedies, in the classical sense of the word, expect for perhaps the final story in the collection, which offered a very satisfying close to the anthology (and a clever bookend if you remember the plot of the first story). The short story cycle is bound by a thematic focus on relationships (romantic, familial, neighborly, etc) and wrestles with questions of nurture, neglect, falling in and out of love, reciprocity, and what we owe to one another. Lahiri proves these questions know no borders or temporality, as her stories transport you back and forth from Massachusetts to Bengal (and some places in between) through the last few decades of the 20th century.

This book made me laugh. It made me sigh. It made me wince. It made me cry. And I savored every minute of it.

The fact that I'm rating this short story collection so highly should mean something to you, because everyone who knows me knows I usually cannot stand diaspora poetry (or prose, for that matter). My standards are high, but Jhumpa Lahiri went above and beyond. Her writing is accessible, but never shallow or corny. Subtle imagery is her strong suit, and it carries through every story in this book. If you notice it, it adds whole new layers of depth and poignancy to already rich plot lines.

Interpreter of Maladies is a series of tragedies, in the classical sense of the word, expect for perhaps the final story in the collection, which offered a very satisfying close to the anthology (and a clever bookend if you remember the plot of the first story). The short story cycle is bound by a thematic focus on relationships (romantic, familial, neighborly, etc) and wrestles with questions of nurture, neglect, falling in and out of love, reciprocity, and what we owe to one another. Lahiri proves these questions know no borders or temporality, as her stories transport you back and forth from Massachusetts to Bengal (and some places in between) through the last few decades of the 20th century.

This book made me laugh. It made me sigh. It made me wince. It made me cry. And I savored every minute of it.

i didnt really find these very striking for the most part. one or two were nice

yasi

Amelia C 

im actually not sure if this was just that good or it was a right book at the right time thing but i pretty much read it at every opportunity i truly couldn't put it down

Id say the stories are pretty evenly split in terms of those that are meh and those that are brilliant. Worth a read though

Fantastic collection of short stories. Simple and easy to follow. Makes you want to call your mom after. 

Ana Ramirez Lee

Fernando Bolaños

Una colección de historias conmovedoras que reflejan el tener que adaptarse a nuevos ambientes con la certeza de nunca regresar de donde proviene uno.

Prashanth Srivatsa

Lahiri keeps it short and simple. The Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of stories that explores loss, alienation and faith among other things. Be it Boori Maa's materialistic neighbours, Miranda's romantic introspection, Mrs. Sen's love for fish amid a life of disappointments, or the beautiful candlelit revelations of Shoba and Shukumar, there is a constant pursuit to tame life and to revert to a period where things were better, only to realize that life moves on of its own accord.

Jamieson

“While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. 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."


This short story collection won a Pulitzer Prize, and is just one of those books I'd heard people talk about a lot though never actually read. I did read the title story, The Interpreter of Maladies, a few years back, but thats it. 

Overall this is a cohesive and engaging collection about loneliness and love. It's also about the experience of living in the Indian diaspora. I thought Lahiri handled the topics deftly. It's clear she has a lot of insight and thoughts about Indian experiences in America, something present in all the stories, but was particularly prominent in the final story, The Third and Final Continent, Mrs Sen's and The Interpreter of Maladies. 

Lahiri definitely has a way with words. She strings together some sentences that, shouldn't really work, but she's a good writer and so they do. I don't love short story collections in general, because I find them too short to really engage me, but I was pulled into quite a few of these stories and I think it's because of the interesting writing and character construction. I'm definitely interested in reading Lahiri's longer works. 

My favourite stories were A Temporary Matter, The Interpreter of Maladies, Sexy, Mrs Sen's and The Third and Final Continent.

With a new Introduction Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.

Celeste Richardson

Interpreter of Maladies is Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut short story collection, and was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. Talk about setting a high standard for yourself! After having read this, I believe it was absolutely deserving of such a prestigious award. This collection is incredible. It’s a series of vastly different lives, connected only but heritage. Age, sex, lifestyle, career, marital status, income bracket, happiness level, and even the continent on which they currently live varies dramatically from narrator to narrator. The only thing they share is their origin: India. Some were born in America to Indian parents. Some are immigrants, whether willingly or unwillingly. Some live their entire lives in India. But all of them were beautifully real, with a heritage that mattered to some of them more deeply than others, but to all of them at the core. Every single story in the collection was lovely and thoughtful in its way, but a handful stood out as favorites, which I’ll discuss briefly below. 

“A Temporary Matter” is about an average day in a average life, with one odd thing throwing off the day as one thing has been throwing off the life. It’s the story of grief ungrieved, and how loss can drive apart those it should bring together. And asks if you can always find a way to bridge that chasm, or if there’s a point of no return. It discusses the small ways we let things go after tragedy; messes uncleaned, a lack of motivation, an unwillingness to leave home, a dislike of former routines, etc. This story hit hard, especially with the ages of the couple and the inability to have children when that was something they had so unthinkingly planned for themselves. Lahiri crafted an aching snapshot of a life that was poignant without being maudlin. It felt honest about the pain without reveling in the pain.

“Mrs. Sen’s” is the story of Elliot, your average American 11-year-old, and Mrs. Sen, the Indian immigrant who begins babysitting him after school. You learn about her culture through Elliot’s eyes, and you also see her deep longing for home and her silent refusal to adapt to life in a new land. She is determined to keep her traditions and willfully ignorant of things that would make her life in America easier, like learning to drive. Elliot grows to love her, though he never says as much, and he witnesses the ways that homesickness can make one truly sick, and the depression that Mrs. Sen suffers as she longs for home and loathes this new life that is nothing like she expected. I found this story incredibly sad, but deeply thought-provoking.

“This Blessed House” was probably my favorite story in the collection. Twinkle is a free spirit, and is impossible for Sanj, her husband and our narrator, to understand. He is a very traditional, erudite man and, when they purchase their first home together, cannot understand Twinkle’s fascination with the various kitschy religion objects the (obviously Catholic) former owners left scattered about. They’re Hindu, he insists, and have no reason in the world to keep such tacky objects for a completely different religion. But Twinkle finds them charming and delightful and wonderfully irreverent, insisting that they not only keep the items but display them, as they are signs that the house is blessed. Set around this disagreement, we see Sanj struggle with the fact that, just sharing a heritage doesn’t mean you actually have anything in common. He had distinct plans, specific things he wanted in a wife, and Twinkle is none of those. Sanj wonders how he ended up here and whether he made a mistake, and yet, though he doesn’t understand the delight she finds in little things, deep down he is obviously charmed by her or he wouldn’t have married her. She’s not classy and elegant and traditional, but she’s full of life. When they throw their first house party, do we watch Sanj fall in love with Twinkle through the eyes of others? I’m still not sure, because the ending was ambiguous, but I like to think so.

“The Third and Final Continent” was a beautifully poignant way to end the collection. Our narrator has recently moved to America for a job, and takes a room with an incredibly elderly woman. He’s also recently married, though his wife is barely real to him, as their marriage was arranged and he left shortly after the wedding. This story wasn’t about much of anything, except for the narrator being in awe of this elderly lady and him finding a way to sympathize with and eventually grow to love his wife when she comes to join him in the states. There was just something about the ending that felt beautifully hopeful, his looking back on his life across three continents and how his “ordinary achievements” in the eyes of others are beyond anything he could have imagined for himself. It’s a lovely sentiment.

The other five stories in the collection were wonderful, as well. Though strangely, if I had to choose a least favorite, it would be the story for which the collection was named. But all in all, the entire book was a wonderful read. This was one of those rare books that had me pausing to contemplate frequently. It’s also one of the few that had me constantly pausing to jot down notes on my phone. Interpreter of Maladies is a quiet collection, incredibly thoughtful without spelling anything out for the reader. Any conclusions we come to, any deep and philosophical concepts we pick up on, are ours; Lahiri merely facilitated without throwing out any of her own opinions. I love when an author can strike that balance, of provoking deep thought without planting it themselves. If you’ve read The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw and enjoyed it, I think this collection will really speak to you. That’s the only other book I’ve read that collects such disparate lives with one binding feature, and while I enjoyed that one, Interpreter of Maladies hit harder for me.

Vivian

Melancholy and lyrical, Lahiri's short stories leave a lot unsaid. The heart of the book is "the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves". 

Lahiri is superb at capturing the predicaments and nuances of immigrants' lives, a blend of insider and outsider views, perpetually pulled by both sides yet stuck in between.

Udit Desai

My first Jhumpa Lahiri book and it got me hooked.

Shelby Doherty

Likes:
- Really enjoyed the topics that were covered in these stories (i.e. immigration, marriage, loneliness, love, fear, embracing the unknown, hardships, etc.
- Deeply enjoyed the following stories: "A Temporary Matter", "Interpreter of Maladies", "Sexy", "Mrs. Sen's", "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar", "The Third and Final Continent"
- The first and last stories were especially touching to me. The first one being so sad as a distant couple is finally reconnecting again during a power outage after a traumatic stillborn birth, only for them to separate shortly after. The last was made me very emotional and I ended up crying. The description of fear and loneliness that can be felt when immigrating is very well portrayed and I found it heartwarming that all of these strangers could form such a strong connection with each other during this.
- The stories that are great are very great, the stories that aren't as great are still fine just not as interesting.
- Huge variety in the stories that are being told, while at the same time still having enough in common to make sense together in a collection.

Dislikes:
- Some of the stories I did not connect with/find particularly interesting (such as "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine", "A Real Durwan", "This Blessed Home"


Chiara Malaspina di Orezzoli

Più tre e mezzo, che quattro, ma mi sentivo di arrotondare per eccesso. Alcuni racconti da eccellenza, altri dimenticabili.

alyssa

it’s crazy how immersive these stories are in only 10-15 pages

Clara Jo

Lahiri is a talented and elegant writer, and manages to convey all sorts of feelings in the simplest of language, but I felt that this collection fell short for me. Perhaps the lean towards traditional storytelling sacrificed a more compelling and unique voice. I enjoyed the exploration of identity and cultural displacement, but was overall expecting more narrative force and depth in her characters. Lovely but not quite memorable or distinguished.

Jennifer Merchant

My favorite of the short stories was "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar." The rest were okay; but not really my type of stories.

Kiya Robinson

Emily

This is my second time reading this book, but my first time reading a lot of its stories. Originally, in June, I read the first two stories of this for school and gave it a rating because I never expected to read the rest. However, obviously, that is not the case. My original rating still stands and I don't have much to say about this book. My favorite stories were "Interpreter of Maladies" and "Sexy." Those were the only two that I would give five stars and actually loved. My least favorites were "When Mr. Prizada Came to Dine" and "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar." So overall, if you are interested in reading this collection of short stories, in my opinion only "Interpreter of Maladies" and "Sexy" are worth reading. 

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3.5 stars. Read for school. We only read the first two short stories but I don’t see myself ever reading the rest, so that’s why I’m just labeling it as “read.” Overall there was really nothing good nor bad in the stories we read, I enjoyed the narration and symbolism, but I just thought the stories were a little boring idk

Anahita Ahluwalia 

Interpreter of Maladies is not just a collection of random short stories that have common components, but a "short story cycle": a deeper look reveals the intricate use of pattern and motif to bind the stories together, including recurring themes of the barriers and opportunities for human communication; community; and the dichotomy of care and neglect.

Lahiri's stories show the diasporic struggle to keep hold of culture as characters build a "hybrid realization" as Asian Americans. However, the value of these stories lies in the fact that they transcend the confined borders of the immigrant experience to embrace larger age-old issues. Further, they highlight the frequently omitted female diasporic subject. Through the foods they eat, and the ways they prepare them, the women in these stories utilize foodways to construct their own unique racialized subjectivity and engender agency.

Lahiri writes with elegance and poise; it’s her placid, constant voice that melts all elements together so seamlessly that they can only be perceived as one whole, as one experience. She navigates the short story brilliantly by starting at the very heart of the matter and letting the readers make their way around—a tough feat to accomplish. Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of universal appeal that captures the human experience from a variety of lenses.

Interpreter of Maladies Stories

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