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 everything is perfect. Some characters are successful in their careers but unfulfilled personal lives and vice versa. All in all, they are living as imperfect-lives as any one of us. This element of realism makes the book magnificent!

Something noteworthy about the stories is their narration: the scenes are evenly spaced and they are never boring; they neither pass the mind’s eye too soon nor too late. Each story has a narrator which is different and this often comes as a surprise: a change from the omniscient third person narrator to the first person in the next story.

The calm of the stories and the ease of flow of the narration make the reader (at least me) keep turning the pages. The completion of the book makes the reader asking for more only.

                                                                                                                      -Kriti Malhotra

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