Interpreter of Maladies
Book Title: Interpreter of Maladies Author: Jhumpa Lahiri Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 13: 978 81 7223 502 4 An anthology of short-stories, Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the Pulitzer Award for Fiction for this book in the year 2000. The feat of the book lies in making every story unique, unpredictable and carefully nuanced. The stories are concerned with a spectrum of characters. They are Indians travelling or living abroad mostly. They range from Bibi Haldar who gets epileptic attacks to the unchristian Sanjeev who abhors his wife Twinkle for her inclination towards everything Christian. The characters’ private lives are explored and the reader realizes that they are as unflattering as theirs. Twinkle gets out of the tub with her face caked and leaves a stray of water as she walks out of the tub and threatens Sanjeev to leave the house in her towel. The stories do not present the world of the characters in a gilded fashion presenting a euphoric world in which eve