Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Interpreter of Maladies
Book Review: UNUSUALLY BORING
Summary: 1 Stars
I had heard so much about this writer and was anxious to read her work. I was highly disappointed when I did. The stories and characters are exceptionally bland and flat. The author has virtually nothing interesting to say about any subject. In fact, the stories come across as being naive--even affected. From what I have gathered about her bio, Ms. Lahiri has spent most of her life sequestered in academia. Perhaps this is a contributing factor for the inauthentic quality of her work. Her style of writing, however, (sentence structure for example) does have a nice quality to it. But style is only one part of the art of writing. In regards to all other aspects (story, characters, suspense, human interest) this collection fails utterly. An extremely disappointing read. I was taken nowhere. Hard to believe this book garnered so many awards.Book Review: The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Summary: 4 Stars
This collection of nine short stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999. The author, Jhumpa Lahiri, is of Indian descent, born in London and currently lives in New York, so each story is a look into a different part of Indian culture or into Indian people and their way of life. The first three stories were great and the title story was my favorite. The man literally is an interpreter of maladies, who works at a hospital translating patients' symptoms to the doctor and in this it is revealed he has a lot of power and obligation in telling the doctor exactly what the patient is suffering from so the correct diagnosis can be given. After this story, I found the rest of book slow, kind of boring, and the stories just weren't as engaging.
What started to annoy me as a I progressed through the book was that here you had a no doubt rich and well treated Indian woman who went to very good schools, lived in a good home in England, went to a good writing school for her MFA - probably in New York - and proceeded to publish her work in prestigious magazines like the New Yorker, and yet she is writing about Indian life and how hard it is for most people, especially those not as well off, and it just really got to me that she had succeeded in this way writing about a way of life she'd never experienced.
Now, having finished the book, my thoughts towards Lahiri have changed a little. For with her upbringing she was never able to experience Indian culture as an Indian living in India. This was no doubt a big deal to her, and is to Indian culture. A friend at work, who is of Indian decent, but born here, told me the other day that Indians don't consider him Indian because he was born here. I realize now that this was probably the very thing that changed my mind about this book. It helped me realize that in writing these stories, Lahiri is living the lives of these people, getting the experiences, that she was never able to, and in doing so is helping to define her Indian heritage better.
The result is a collection of interesting and unique stories - perhaps not quite deserving of the Pulitzer -- about Indian people trying to live ordinary Indian lives.
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Book Review: Great stories
Summary: 5 Stars
I liked every one of the stories in "Interpreter of Maladies". Well written.
It's rare to find a collection of short stories where all of the stories are good.
Book Review: Worthy of a Pulitzer Prize
Summary: 5 Stars
After seeing numerous praises of this book, I finally had to read it for myself. And I'm glad I did. Even though this book is a compilation of nine unrelated short stories with the only common theme being either India or Bangladesh, it leaves the reader with plenty to think about. Lahiri's writing is vivid and fresh. Her subjects and dialogue are realistic and touch upon the human experience. Of all the stories, I enjoyed "A Temporary Matter" the best, if only because it is the one story I related to best. But all are worth reading. The book overall is short, but the stories will linger with you for a long time. Book Review: So what?
Summary: 2 Stars
There is nothing that I can point to as terrible in this book, necessarily, other than to say that it never really did better than just OK. Each story has basically the same arc, the same generic characters, and the same tone. Once I had finished the first story I never felt anything different than when I finished any of the others, which was basically a ho-hum response.
There were two real problems I had, first being that there never was anything at stake, it was just quaint and nothing more. This might have been OK in a stand alone story, but with each successive piece I became more and more frustrated. The problems generally felt really minor, and never developed into something worth caring about. Yeah, the wife found some Christian symbols around the house, so what?
The second problem was the characters, who can basically be summarized as Indian and Muslim. Had this been written by a white person I might have accused them of relying too heavily on stereotypes, here I just blame a lack of imagination. Every story establishes right away that the characters are both, but I often wondered while reading if that even mattered. Imagine if in one story it said, "They were white Protestants," and another, "They were a non-religious black couple," would that have made a difference? How about if it didn't say anything at all, would you have been able to guess what they were supposed to be? In each story, I didn't think it would have changed how I read who or what they were as it never informed them or the story, nor did they seem to really grow beyond that basic description.
What bothers me the most about this book is the massive attention and accolades it has received despite not really being groundbreaking or moving. After reading all of the press and hearing from people (mostly those who had not read it) how good it was supposed to be, I finished the book feeling depressed that there are far better books out there that examined cultural identity and a sense of belonging that went unnoticed. There are some good images and writing in here, but it's nothing special.