Overview
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.
Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
Synopsis
Since the release of Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri has won almost every award bestowed on a first book of fiction. The nine stories in this stunning debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.
With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakistani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta who, among other things, is struggling to learn to drive. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.
Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world. Interpreter of Maladies introduces "a wonderful new voice in American fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri is a sensitive chronicler of the immigrant experience. Interpreter of Maladies is a wise and sophisticated collection" (Bharati Mukherjee).
New York - Ariel Levy
The experience of being foreign and the need for connection both mark Lahiri's outstanding debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in which intimacy is often the odd consequences of her character's admitting how distant they have become, or always were.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"[Lahiri] announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice. Indeed, Ms. Lahiri's prose is so eloquent and assured that the reader easily forgets the 'Interpreter of Maladies' is a young writer's first book...Ms. Lahiri chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise, and with 'Interpreter of Maldies' she has made a precocious debut." The New York Times"Lahiri's touch in these nine tales is delicate, but her observations remain damningly accurate, and her bittersweet stories are unhampered by nostalgia..." Publishers Weekly
"Lahiri's touch is delicate yet assured, leaving no room for flubbed notes or forced epiphanies." The Los Angeles Times
"Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation...Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives...[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers." USA Today
"[S]torytelling of surpassing kindness and skill." The San Francisco Chronicle
"India is an inescapable presence in this strong first collection's nine polished and resonant tales, most of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications." Kirkus Reviews
Michiko Kakutani
...[Lahiri] announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice....[She] chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise...a precocious debut.—The New York Times
Heather Harlan
...[The stories have] very unHollywood-like denouements that are Lahiri's trademark — endings with multiple stray ends that leave you asking what happened next. Kind of like in real life.—AsianWeek
Ginia Bellafante
Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies has a gift for illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships with lovers, family, friends, and those me in travel.— Time Out New York
USA Today
Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation...Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives...[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers.Ariel Levy
The experience of being foreign and the need for connection both mark Lahiri's outstanding debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in which intimacy is often the odd consequences of her character's admitting how distant they have become, or always were.— New York
From The Critics
There is not one false note here, not one misstep or hestiation....[E]ach of these nine stories has the capacity to amaze us...Natural Home Magazine
Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories helps us understand what it means to suffer the loss of strong cultural support in the melding of today's world.Caleb Crain
Her subject is not love's failure...but the opportunity that an artful spouse (like an artful writer) can make of failure....She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics.— The New York Times Book Review
Laura Shapiro
Lahiri's language is uncluttered; she's sparing with metaphor, and the riches accumulate unobtrusively.— Newsweek
Freeman
...in her wondrous tales, Lahiri depicts Indian-Americans struggling with their connections to the India of their memory. Although their ties to the country differ in degree, Lahiri's characters all interpret their maladies of the heart through their cultural identity.—Time Out New York
Anderson Tepper
What makes Lahiri's debut collection of stories stand out is precisely its quality of unexpected ordinariness. Its not that these tales of Americanized Indians are themselves ordinary...It's the familiarity of the world Lahiri captures...that distinguishes the books...Brimming with promise, Lahiri has a knack for exposing the silent sacrifices and small moments of ridiculousness of people navigating between two worlds.—Time Out NY