The author uses language as a precision tool: the tales are so short that every sentence has its purpose. Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Anton Pavlovič Chekhov, Lahiri’s concise writing takes common subjects and gives them depth. Published in 1999, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Indians in exile as they try to navigate between two different worlds.
As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final Continent," comments: "There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family.Interpeter of Maladies is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, a collection of short stories for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Yet the situations Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend ethnicity. Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Lahiri's subtle, bittersweet ending is characteristic of the collection as a whole. I was hoping you could help me feel better say the right thing. I'm tired of feeling so terrible all the time. "I told you because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling secret. Das and then becomes her unwilling confidant when she reads too much into his profession. Das-first-generation Americans of Indian descent-and their children. Kapasi has problems enough of his own in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man.
Take, for example, Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A Temporary Matter" whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn child. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection.
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