Interpreter of Maladies

I had wanted to read the Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri since long but got an opportunity only recently. Having read rave reviews about this book which has sold about a quarter of a million copies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction(2000), the O. Henry award and a couple others, I wanted to discover what was so great about this collection of short stories.

Moreover, it was written by an Indian-American Bengali and naturally all stories were biased towards Indian-American immigrants.

To begin with, the style of narration is amazingly good. So elegantly written, they are a pleasure to read! The backgrounds for the stories begin somewhere far away from the place of their climax and the author weaves through the continents and cultures giving the reader a glimpse of the authentic Indian values and traditions. One natural difficulty was that being from South India, I never knew much about the customs of Bengalis which stand out in amost every story. Too much of fish eating and non-vegetarian culinary information in almost every story makes it a hard book to read when I am eating something!

But quite a few stories were a disappointment in their climax. The lofty expectations fall short in some stories giving way to endings that lack in vigour and that 'spark' that you expect from a short story.

Still, I enjoyed reading this book and my current reading is the Namesake by the same author.

Rating: 7/10 - definitely worth your time.