Rating: 5 StarsGenre: Short-Stories, South-Asian fiction
Synopsis: Short stories about India, or being Indian living in the U.S.
I'm just going to come out and say it, I love Jhumpa Lahiri. She's such an amazing writer and has such a talent for description and nuance. Interpreter of Maladies consists of nine short stories. The book is not very long so it can be finished in a few sittings. I'll summarize and review each story separately because there's no way I can make any sweeping generalizations about the whole book.
But first off, some criticism about Jhumpa Lahiri that I want to talk about. She gets a lot of crap for only writing about Indian professors/students living in Cambridge. But so what? Leave the lady alone. Let her write what she wants to write. It's obviously working so why mess with a good thing? Whether she grows as a writer or not is nobody's business but hers. So, let's start.
"A Temporary Matter" is the first story in the collection. It's about a husband and a wife who become estranged after the death of their first child in the delivery room, but they are finally brought together by a series of blackouts in the neighborhood. They sit in the dark, and they tell each other truths they have never revealed before. Only in the dark, which is reminiscent to their life in India when electrical shortages weren't uncommon, do they open up about their feelings. The story is all about relationships and communication. Personally, it is one of my favorites in the collection.
