Recent reads

Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

I have spent the entire new year holiday struggling with a bad cold. Nothing much I could do except sneezing, coughing, blowing my nose and sleeping away the joyous time of celebration. In some moments that I was able to stay awake, I managed to finish reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, which I had started reading about a month ago.

I always prefer short stories to fictions or novels as the moderate size of the former is more friendly to my attention which easily loses its power of concentration.

I do enjoy most of the stories in this collection. They do not feature dramatic moments that attempt to astound or impress readers. Instead, Lahiri narrates in a peaceful, quiet, and matter-of-fact style the pain, joy, struggle, failure and survival of Indian immigrants in England, United States, or back in the native country.

The sense of pain and loss that some characters suffer from remains powerful through the narrator's quiet and observatory tone of narration. It engages my thought as if the steady pace of the narrative is stroking my nerve gently and regularly till the end. The author does not try to hammer into readers anything that she writes, but it simply grips attention. I love some of the stories which end with unresolved loss and longing, a kind of incompleteness that stories of immigrants usually share. Some are presented through the viewpoints of children adding humor to or emphasizing the endured suffering. Some are about aspiration, self-delusion, and disillusion.

Of course, there is also a small number of some tuning the song of survival in the end. However, to be honest, I find them somehow unfitting to the collection, a collection of stories about how individuals struggle to fit into their new world. Positive and happy ending is what we need in reality, but sometimes I think a short story is at its best when it does not conclude the plight, and it is more effective when it continues to provoke thoughts rather than to soothe the sufferers.