Review of Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

*Interpreter of Maladies* by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000). Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I first read a Jhumpa Lahiri novel two years before writing this, when I was studying Bengali on a full scholarship from the United States government. Back then I was reading The Namesake because I had found a copy when I was at my local Savers, and it was the first setting and background for someone who was just getting their feet wet in Bengali culture and its diaspora.

Two years later, with a lot more research and linguistic experience under my belt, I ended up returning to that same Savers one day and found a gold mine of books.

I almost didn’t buy this copy of Interpreter of Maladies, but I had already picked up four books. At my Savers, if you buy four books, you can pick up one more book for free. So I ended up picking up Maladies because I was able to get it for free.

And surprisingly, despite it literally being the last book I had picked up during that trip, I ended up reading it first. There aren’t a ton of stories packed into this book, so when you actually get through the first three, there isn’t a ton more to read. So I ended up finishing this in about an hour tops.

Onwards with the review!

Nine short stories on the lives of South Asians and Desi Americans.

Instead of my usual summary situation I do in reviews, I think short story collections are tricky to summarize because that ruins the fun of all the stories contained within the collection. So I’m going to run through what I think are the strengths of this collection—I couldn’t find any flaws really, which is a summary of my feeling of Lahiri’s work I’ve read so far in general.

I thought The Namesake was such a brilliant piece of literature and I still have my copy—if I don’t love a book, I typically get rid of it if I have a physical copy after about a year or so.

Short story collections are tricky because if they’re not united enough they might seem a little too fragmented for the reader to connect the dots between them, but at the same time you need to be careful when it comes to craft and their similarities.

If they’re too alike then you’re going to lose your reader halfway through the collection and the odds of them not finishing it are so much higher than if you had just put a bunch of very different pieces together.

Lahiri does an excellent job of differentiating each of the stories in this way. I think the characters had their own unique struggles that were characterized by different life events that are all connected, whether it’s the Partition of India, immigration to the States, or feeling a disconnect between the new land and the old one.

I thought the most poignant story when I was reading was the one about the old woman who babysits an American boy. Her story encompasses what I thought was the crux of the novel, as the boy, an American, talks about how he views her as stuck in her ways.

She listens to Bengali radio and her mother’s recordings from when she was young, and she ends up taking the boy all the way across town to go to the fish market. She is unable to learn to drive for some reason, but when she finally has the incentive to get in the car and take the boy, they end up in an accident. All progress has been lost for her.

Overall Thoughts

What Lahiri does so well is flesh each and every one of these characters out, even if they’re meant to be fleeting in the narrative and speaker’s life. When she published this there wasn’t a ton of representation in the American literature scene, and not that we have a ton of it yet either (though it’s much better than it used to be), she gave them their own worlds and made them culturally distinguishable in an authentic way.

She broke the stereotypes and presented a different culture in mainstream American literature in a time where it was common to resort to stereotypes.

Such a brilliant collection of short stories. That’s all I can say—pick it up if you haven’t already.

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