Interpreter of Maladies

#114
Title: Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Mariner Books
Year: 1999
Genre: Fiction
198 pages

The general malady relentlessly presented in this short story collection is tension in relationships--particularly marital relationships, but others as well. The more specific malady is the existential and pragmatic shock of the Emergency--the 1947 partition of Pakistan--and the later secession of Bangladesh. These sociocultural and political ruptures form the nominally-explicit back story that informs the protagonists' emotional wariness and disillusion.

The best stories are about contemporary Indian-American families, either alone or interacting with Euro-Americans or other South Asians. The less-successful stories take place away from this context and are more forced and less interesting ("A Real Durwan" is an example ). At her best, Lahiri conveys a great deal of historical information (with which most U.S. readers are unlikely to be unfamiliar) with very little exposition and in a way that is relevant to the characters' conflicts. Read the collection in order as it hangs together well as a sequence. Read with Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things for a very different tone, and with the first few chapters of Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond for tediously rendered but informative history.