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Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Prologue: I have never been a great fan of the short story, or of collections of short stories. No matter how much I like an author’s work, his or her short story collections are inevitably the hardest for me to get through. I think this has more to do with expectations and momentum than actual content. I expect myself to finish every story I start before I stop reading, and that makes me put pressure on myself—but isn’t that the idea of a short story, that you read it in a single sitting? As far as momentum, once I do finish a single story, there’s nothing familiar waiting when I turn the page to the next one—it’s a whole new world I need to learn, and for me the hardest part of reading a book is starting, so a short story collection presents me with my least favorite part of reading over and over again. Alas…

Argument: Jhumpa Lahiri made it easy for me to forget about my issues with short stories. Her debut collection, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000, has several themes that bind the stories together, and her talent for letting each story unfold is remarkable. I read the first story, “A Temporary Matter,” at 5 AM on an airplane, and it was only the fact that I was sitting next to a stoic Canadian man that prevented me from crying at the end. In 20 pages Lahiri made me care about the couple in the story, made me understand their entire past, the tragedies they had survived, and the pain that they now sought to escape and put behind them. The ending, like the ending to each story in the collection, could go either way, but none of the surprises that arrive toward the end of a tale feel forced; they flow almost inevitably from the story, no matter how unlikely they seem until you read them.

There is not a bad story in this collection. At only 200 pages it presents a week’s worth of nightly reading. As you may guess from the author’s name, all of the stories feature aspects of life in India or as an Indian living in America, particularly the East Coast. They are windows on a culture that is a quiet presence in Chicago and across most of the nation, a culture that we do not often see into as deeply as Lahiri allows us to in this work.

Appendix:
Other recent short story collections of note:
Adam Haslett, You Are Not A Stranger Here
David Sedaris, Naked or Me Talk Pretty One Day
Richard Russo, The Whores Child
Michael Chabon, A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth