Interpreter of Maladies

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Literature

Aug 11, 2018

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. 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.

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Rebecca Klopp

Jan 2, 2019

I’ve never been a fan of short stories but I really loved this book.

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