Some of the stories were brilliant, some were very good and only a couple were meh. This novel captures for me the right tension between foreignness and loneliness and those small wires, crumbs of connection that bridge people and cultures. Yeah, I dug it. The language employed by the writer to present her characters is another vital aspect. The language is simple and precise without being dramatic. More importantly the body language of the character plays vital part in communicating the essence and the feeling within the characters. Interpreter of Maladies is a book collection of nine short stories by American author of Indian origin Jhumpa Lahiri published in 1999. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in the year 2000 and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. It was also chosen as The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year and is on Oprah Winfrey's Top Ten Book List.

Interpreter of Maladies” is a story with a setting and dialogues which may not be larger than life but is as close and real as life could be though the writer presents her work as a fictionalized account of her imagination and creativity. The author exhibits her majestic power of story telling with such grace and allure that the most wonderful thing happened to me today. I seemed to have lost the sense of 'time' while reading this splendid depiction of the plight of the homeless. This doesn't happen often.Sexy” centers on Miranda, a young white woman who has an affair with a married Indian man named Dev. Although one of Miranda's work friends is an Indian woman named Laxmi, Miranda knows very little about India and its culture. The first time she meets Dev, she is not able to discern his ethnicity. However, she is instantly captivated by his charm and the thrill of being with an exotic, older man. Dev takes Miranda to the Mapparium, where he whispers "You're sexy." Miranda buys clothes that she thinks are suitable for a mistress, but feels pangs of guilt because Dev is married. Meanwhile, Laxmi's cousin has been abandoned by her husband, who left the cousin for a younger woman. One day, Laxmi's cousin comes to Boston and Miranda is asked to babysit the cousin's seven-year-old son, Rohin. Rohin asks Miranda to try on the clothes that she bought, and gives Miranda insight into his mother's grief. Miranda decides that she and Dev's wife both "deserve better," and stops seeing Dev. Noelle Brada-Williams notes that Indian-American literature is under-represented and that Lahiri deliberately tries to give a diverse view of Indian Americans so as not to brand the group as a whole. She also argues that Interpreter of Maladies is not just a collection of random short stories that have common components, but a " short story cycle" in which the themes and motifs are intentionally connected to produce a cumulative effect on the reader: "...a deeper look reveals the intricate use of pattern and motif to bind the stories together, including recurring themes of the barriers to and opportunities for human communication; community, including marital, extra-marital, and parent-child relationships; and the dichotomy of care and neglect." [5] In When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dinner, a young Indian-American girl meets a Pakistani man her family routinely invites to dinner. Somewhat cut off from the culture of her immigrant parents, Lilia does not understand that Mr. Pirzada, since Partition, is no longer considered the same as her parents. The Indian war with Pakistan in 1971 endangers Mr. Pirzada's daughters. Witnessing his love and fears, Lilia gains a new awareness of a world larger than her own. year-old Bibi Haldar is gripped by a mysterious ailment, and myriad tests and treatments have failed to cure her. She has been told to stand on her head, shun garlic, drink egg yolks in milk, to gain weight and to lose weight. The fits that could strike at any moment keep her confined to the home of her dismissive elder cousin and his wife, who provide her only meals, a room, and a length of cotton to replenish her wardrobe each year. Bibi keeps the inventory of her brother's cosmetics stall and is watched over by the women of their community. She sweeps the store, wondering loudly why she was cursed to this fate, to be alone and jealous of the wives and mothers around her. The women come to the conclusion that she wants a man. When they show her artifacts from their weddings, Bibi proclaims what her own wedding will look like. Bibi is inconsolable at the prospect of never getting married. The women try to calm her by wrapping her in shawls, washing her face or buying her new blouses. After a particularly violent fit, her cousin Haldar emerges to take her to the polyclinic. A remedy is prescribed—marriage: “Relations will calm her blood.” Bibi is delighted by this news and begins to plan and plot the wedding and to prepare herself physically and mentally. But Haldar and his wife dismiss this possibility. She is nearly 30, the wife says, and unskilled in the ways of being a woman: her studies ceased prematurely, she is not allowed to watch TV, she has not been told how to pin a sari or how to prepare meals. The women don't understand why, then, this reluctance to marry her off if she such a burden to Haldar and his wife. The wife ask who will pay for the wedding? Personally, I don't care about awards (See William H. Gass). And I really don't care that she's a woman (other than the fact that I'm trying to read more women this year) or that she's Indian American (although both are a significant part of this collection).

Mrs. Das has kept the secret for eight years – Bobby’s age. She tells Mr. Kapasi that she and her husband were engaged in high school and married in college. They never wanted to spend a moment apart. But the reality of being married and having a child so young took its toll. She rarely saw friends from college and ended up staying at home all day, isolated with baby Ronny. A visiting friend of Mr. Das’s made advances towards Mrs. Das and she did not resist. The man is now married and the couples trade photos at Christmas time. The characters that populate Lahiri’s world live in the tense duality of being exiles, but proud to have left India to build a prosperous life in the West. Their Indian heritage acts as a catalyzer for all the events that seem to unfold in slow motion like a sequence of images that uphold the solitary confinement of the characters, leading up to an anticlimactic outcome that is muffled by the mundane quality of the troubles that haunt them.

Abstract:

But to Lahiri's credit, her prose is very simplistic and is a pleasure to read, contrary to Roy's. Also, Lahiri's vivid descriptions of life of immigrants in the US is very realistic. But again, I am not sure if I should be giving her too much credit in this regard. She is based out of US and she knows the nuances of life in US (the peanut butter and jelly combination etc.). So, that probably never involved too much research. Real credit goes to authors who write about lifestyles that they are totally unfamiliar with.Take Yann Martel (Yes!He is one of my favorite authors!) for example, his description of life in India in his award winning book, Life Of Pi, is commendable. Unfamiliar with India as he was, he sure did his homework before he wrote the book. An important aspect to be noted about this story is the fact that the writer’s tone in presentation of this tale of grief, tragedy and deception is in totality neutral. This neutral tone is essentially employed to by the writer as the writer, I believe desires the readers form their own individual perspectives of each character and decide who and why they wish to empathize with. This style of presentation makes provision for an unbiased formation of a point of view on the part of the reader facilitated primarily by the writer. Many a times, writer tend to shadow their narrative with their personal and judgmental opinion which I believe that the writer here has refrained from doing so making this an exemplary work of art. The beauty which lies in this story are that the protagonists are real people and not larger than life characters and hence the readers can identify with them and emphasize with their plight. The reader is engrossed in the storyline to such an extent that he no longer remains a reader but a mute spectator in the story travelling with the characters. Such is the strength of presentation of the writer.