I’ve not yet read The Namesake, but it awaits me on my shelf, and I have no doubt I’ll read it at some point. While I liked the stories in Unaccustomed Earth, I feel like Interpreter of Maladies is the stronger and more beautiful collection.
When Lahiri’s latest short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, came out a few years ago, I read it. Thankfully, they are plenty interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention! I found myself spreading them out, reading one a day so as to allow each story to sink in. Every sentence is important, which made her stories hard to skim. She tells you what you need to know but does not bother with superfluous words. It’s not complex or flowery, yet it is characterized by a simple beauty. Lahiri’s writing is deceptively straightforward. It’s as if you’re watching events and emotions unfold instead of experiencing them yourself. This narrative style has the effect of removing the reader by a degree. There were stories told in first person, limited third person, and even one in first person plural, but I always felt that the narrator was more a lens through which to observe the focal character, not so much a developed character him- or herself. As I read, I got the feeling that no story was actually about the person narrating. Lahiri has a distinct way of narrating her stories. Regardless of the characters, settings, and situations she chooses, Lahiri weaves her themes into her stories’ cores. Though the surface permutations and secondary themes differ from story to story, beneath each one runs a shared current of the issues cited above. The back of my copy of Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, cites Lahiri’s “signature themes” as being “the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.” The quote refers to The Namesake, but it applies equally well to Interpreter of Maladies. Each story is its own entity yet is tied to the others, at the deepest level, by shared themes. There is a young man beginning a life for himself in Boston and an American woman having an affair with an Indian man. There’s a tour guide who takes an American family of Indian descent on a trip to the Sun Temple. There’s a young woman in India with an unnamed illness. There’s an American child who spends his afternoons in the care of a woman who can’t let go of India and adjust to life in the US.
There’s an Indian couple living in the US and slowly pulling apart. The characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection cover plenty of ground. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri was my book group’s January selection.
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