This book was fine, it really was. But I was expecting more than fine from it; I mean, it won a Pulitzer and the overall consensus seems to be that it is brilliant and hardbreaking and showcasting how impactful short stories can be; and still, it didn't quite work for me.

There were a couple of stories that I really enjoyed ("Sexy" and "Mrs. Sen" to be exact) and none were bad, but that wasn't enough for me. I liked Ms. Lahiri's viewpoint and how carefully she seems to have constructed her stories and the deliberate way she chose her words, but emotionally the stories failed to resonate with me. And that's a shame because I really wanted them to. So maybe my meh-feeling is down to too high expectations and the struggles I sometimes have with short stories.

بعد از خاك غريب دومين اثري است كه از اين نويسنده ميخونم،باتوجه به اينكه اين كتاب هم شبيه كتاب قبليش بود دوسش داشتم،البته گويا اينو قبل از اون نوشته :دي
قلمشو خيلي دوس دارم،توصيفاتشو دوس دارم،با اينكه كتاباش داستاناي كوتاهه و من داستان كوتاه دوست ندارم ولي بازم كتاباشو دوس دارم.

It is a collection of short stories, primarily American in tone and nature, but with elements of Inidian culture from an American-Indian who is obviously exploring her mis-matching heritage.

This collection draws you in with a superbly written opening story that is evocative not only of it's setting and time, but of everything it describes. The first opening short grabs you carefully and leads you to a surprising end.

And that was it. Each story that came next was just a regurgitated culture-clash of two countries trying to fit inside one person. They were, in a word, dull. They followed the same kind of pattern, of description: some nice evocation of the sights and smells in the immediate vicinity and then... sentimentality takes over and the tiny splash of Indian-tonic is overpowered by flowery prose that never deviates from it's opening style.

They also included that detestable contemporary storytelling trope of being mysterious with metaphors without actually saying anything. It may warm your heart and make you believe you've read something profound, but you have not.

I feel slightly cheated, having enjoyed the first story actually quite a lot. If it had been that one single story, this book would have been a good read. As it stands, it is a collection of one story, just with different words.


Follows are mini reviews of each story, to remind myself of the individual;

'A Temporary Matter', 4 Stars: Definitely was not expecting to like nor enjoy these stories, but the first one really grabs you and doesn't let go. The story itself is a quiet one, set in one little world, but as anyone who has lived will tell you, their own little worlds are the biggest things ever.

The writing is so good, drawing you in but not being overly metaphorical, which is always my main issue with short stories. This was a goodly length, the right pace and just the exact amount of sadness. It punches you, but very gently.

'When Mr Pirdaza Came to Dine', 1 Star: Nicely paced and written, and I appreciate the sentiment of the story, but I only found it boring.

'Interpreter of Maladies', 1 Star: Wasn't quite what I was expecting. Nicely written but I found it boring.

'A Real Durwan', 1 Star: A kind of Peter and the Wolf tale as far as I can reckon, though I found it to be a little of that contemporary metaphor-filled nonsense that I do dislike. Written nicely like the others, but boring as usual.

'Sexy', 1 Star: I can see a pattern developing with these stories after a very nice and promising start. Written well, but I just find the stories boring, the characters boring and everything in between boring.

'Mrs Sens', 1 Star: More pattern. Written well and at times I felt like the story would pick up and I would feel the magic I felt whilst reading the first story of this collection, but sadly I only found it boring like the others.

'This Blessed House', 2 Stars: I enjoyed this until the end, and then it became another boring story with that unending contemporary mystery of metaphor. I was drawn in to the lives of this newly married couple and was intrigued as to where their story was going. But it ended abruptly, and I didn't understand why I should care, and the metaphors were infuriating as usual.

'The Treatment of Bibi Haldar', 1 Star: Another story that promised great things through it's writing style, and yet does not deliver even remotely.

'The Third and Final Continent', 2 Stars: As evocative as the first and with a nice sentiment, yet still I found it dull. A better end to the stories with nice description that led me through the black and white, but sadly there was nothing to make me care for the characters, nor indeed particularly believe what was being told.

4,5*

"Não sou o único a tentar a sorte e ganhar a vida longe do meu país, e certamente não sou o primeiro. Mas, no entanto, há alturas em que fico maravilhado por cada milha que tenho viajado, cada refeição que tomei, por todas as pessoas que conheci. Por muito vulgar que seja, há alturas que todos estes factos ultrapassam a minha imaginação.

O que torna Jhumpa Lahiri tão distinta de outros autores não é só o facto de escrever sobre personagens de ascendência indiana, oriundas de um universo que considero extremamente fascinante apesar de muito problemático, mas é também a atenção ao detalhe. São os pormenores na vida, na casa, nos pensamentos e nos actos das personagens que as tornam reais e me fazem querer saber mais sobre elas, mesmo quando não são particularmente simpáticas ou sensatas.
Nestes nove contos impregnados pelas mentiras que nos contam e que contamos a nós mesmos, temos pessoas desajustadas tanto do lugar como do momento em que se encontram, que têm dificuldade em viver com a realidade que se lhes apresenta e, vendo-se com pouco controlo sobre o seu destino, por questões familiares, amorosas, socioeconómicas ou geográficas, sentem-se alienadas e isoladas.
Das minhas histórias preferidas desta colectânea destaco três. Em “Um Problema Temporário”, um casal que perdeu um bebé aproveita os cortes de energia para contar segredos, o que tanto pode uni-los como afastá-los ainda mais. Em “Um Verdadeiro Durwan”, uma velhota humilde vive num vão de escada em troca de limpar e guardar um prédio, na esperança de ascender à categoria de porteira. Finalmente, no conto que dá título a esta obra, “Intérprete de Enfermidades”, um homem infeliz fantasia um pouco enquanto serve de motorista a turistas, nos dias em que não está a trabalhar num consultório médico como intérprete.
No fundo, é Jhumpa Lahiri que é uma intérprete maravilhosa dos vários males da alma.

"Não tinha nunca achado nada de nobre na actividade de intérprete de maleitas ou enfermidades de outras pessoas, assiduamente traduzindo os sintomas de tantos ossos inchados, inúmeras cãibras de barriga e de instestinos, pequenas manchas nas palmas das mãos que mudavam de cor, de formato e de tamanho. (..) Aquele emprego era um bom sinal de ter falhado na vida. Na sua juventude, tinha sido um aluno exemplar de línguas estrangeiras, dono de uma colecção de dicionários de respeito. Tinha sonhado tornar-se intérprete de diplomatas e de gente de alto gabarito.

This collection won the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and— most impressively—the New Yorker Debut of the Year. When a book receives this amount of awards, it’s a) lazy—why give two prestigious prizes to the SAME book? b) going to give the reader unrealistic expectations and c) a conspiracy of critics. This collection arrived at a time when an Indian writer hadn’t been given a Pulitzer or important award, and the committee wanted to expand its reach outside middle-class white male Americans. The stories, mercifully, still contain American settings, but have enough watered down Indianness in them to appeal to a mass market, and enough simple sentiment and sentence structure to universalize love loss sadness relationships and so on. Also, Jhumpia is a woman, and a woman hadn’t won in a while. The stories in this collection are fine but all utilise the same straightforward, overly descriptive, consciously “traditional” narrative voice, one that doesn’t take risks or explore interesting forms or ideas, falling back on saccharine or poetic tropes to go for the heartstrings and not the intellect, using human dramas in far-off homelands to manipulate the immigrant reader rather than new or novel techniques. This is not to say she isn’t a talented writer. Only I feel violently this mode of writing is beating a middlebrow, Oprah-shaped drum, and doesn’t do much except warm a heart or state the obvious.

Just superlative. Her writing transported me immediately into whatever world she had created.

I was fully immersed with every story. Her writing is not flowery or verbose. At the end of each story, I “got it”. I understood the point she was making. I did not walk away from a story asking “what did I just read? I don’t understand the point of this story”. Some of the stories had sad endings, some had hopeful endings. But regardless of the tone of the ending, I felt satisfied—that I had read another good story.

I just finished a story a couple days ago that won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and I could not understand why it merited such an award from that prestigious institution. Well, this collection won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000—I could fully understand the deserving recognition this author got. A superb job. I will want to read more of her. I just read a very nice book review by a GR reviewer, Glenn, of her collection of essays on book covers, The Clothing of Books (2016), so that will certainly be on my TBR list!

In looking at one of the reviews for this book, I couldn’t put it any better than they did: “Within a short number of pages, Lahiri successfully articulates characters that are multifaceted, dynamic and wholly original. Her prose in general is on point—simple yet rich.”
https://www.booknookrevs.com/nook/rev...

Stories in order of their appearance and where they were initially published (last story was apparently new for this collection) and my ratings:
•t"A Temporary Matter" (previously published in The New Yorker) — 5 stars
•t"When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" (previously published in The Louisville Review) —4 stars
•t"Interpreter of Maladies" (previously published in the Agni Review) — 10 stars if I could
•t"A Real Durwan" (previously published in the Harvard Review) — 4 stars
•t"Sexy" (previously published in The New Yorker) — 4 stars
•t"Mrs. Sen's" (previously published in Salamander) — 3.5 stars
•t"This Blessed House" (previously published in Epoch) — 5 stars
•t"The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" (previously published in Story Quarterly) — 3.5 stars
•t"The Third and Final Continent" — 7 stars if I could

Reviews:
•thttps://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
•thttp://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/p...
•https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream...

قصص بحبكة روائية شديدة التكثيف، سرد حميمي عن الهنود المغتربين في الولايات المتحدة؛ وبالأخص هنود إقليم البنجال ومدينة كلكتا الشهيرة. تعكس الثقافات المختلفة، ومصاعب الاغتراب والهوية المفقودة أحيانًا. نصوص عميقة وتنضح بالجمال والوصف الحميم، الشخصيات محفورة بعمق ولا تنسى مع نمط سردي متين البنية وشديد الاتقان والتفرد.

"ولست الرجل الوحيد الذي يبحث عن حظه بعيدًا عن وطنه، وبالتأكيد لست الأول في ذلك. فإنني أشعر أحيانًا بالذهول وأنا أفكر في كل ميل قطعته مسافرًا، وكل وجبة طعام تناولتها، وكل شخص تعرفت إليه، وكل حجرة نمت فيها. وعلى الرغم من الصورة العادية التي تبدو عليها كل تلك الأشياء، فإنني أحيانًا أفكر في أنها أشياء تتجاوز خيالي".

{قصة القارة الثالثة والأخيرة مستوحاة من قصة والد الكاتبة}

4.5 stars ☆

This is quite the moving, colorfully woven collection of short stories…now on to my further thoughts on specific stories that settled within me with a singing spirit of heart and frank courage of soul amidst Jhumpa Lahiri's explorations into the global experience of people:

“A Temporary Matter”:

The darkness opens up an intimacy, whether negative or positive reveals itself more clearly as the story goes on, between this husband and wife who are falling out of love, as they do nothing but occupy space together. The negative space that sits itself between them painting a poignant picture of what has been lost to the stillness of words unsaid and can’t cleanse itself any further from the ways it has been singed beyond recognition.

As distance worms its way further and further between them they can’t help but fall further and further out of rhythm with the other, habits, zapped of energy, replacing what was once love. Their idiosyncrasies which once molded together with the ease of clay causing each other now a bitter torment.

The darkness in fact has become a presence of its own in their collapsing relationship that has begun to recede with the quickness of a tide, rushing to be found by the certainty of shore again.

Since the time power has gone out in their building, a proceeding powerlessness has haplessly settled itself over their relationship that’s coated in a melancholia and nostalgia for times past, a time of selves caressed by a calming closeness and elevating warmness.

The wife then begins a game with her husband, whether to rekindle a connection or lead up to a truth she needs the courage to reveal, only time will decide. For in life, things can turn temporary in a shattering reversal, even if they were once promised to be bounded to forever.

“Interpreter of Maladies”:

A family is led around by a tour guide who not only interprets the landscape and local culture, but also interprets people’s physical ailments. A new family he comes into contact with to lead around strikes his interest in particular and begins to impact his sense of self/temporarily fill a void in him that has been left empty and loveless for as long as his heart, mind, and body can remember. He especially finds this void filled by the mother, Mrs. Das, after she proclaims that his profession as an interpreter of maladies is romantic.

As soon as Mr. Kapasi learns from Mrs. Das that she considers his profession romantic, something within him pivotally shifts and he feels seen for the first time in a while, which provokes a profound stirring of desire in him, not only for her, but for things and emotions lost, voided with the elapsing of a time bygone that he can never get back. And with this stirring of profound, deepening desire and reawakening of his sense of purpose he, in turn, begins to project his more romantic notions of Mrs. Das onto her, as her one comment has cemented his existence in something more verifiably tangible, validating that his presence is felt and needed.

Mrs. Das unwittingly becomes Mr. Kapasi’s own interpreter as she unpacks his profession and realizes her own sense of who he is and can be as a man. Mr. Kapasi is drawn deeper and deeper into feeling an imagined subject of romantic attraction just because his love language is someone verbally appreciating him and acknowledging what he does, like Mrs. Das has, even though her actual meaning and intention is in fact never romantic. People read and interpret things how they need to, however, in order to feel some sort of comforting antidote to their lingering, acute loneliness that hinders their ability to feel anything else.

This short story was quite impactful in how it explored the different worlds and burdens people carry, the way we live and how we idealistically romanticize, even inventing our own subtext, and, in culmination, ultimately revealed that our language of feeling pain is more universally understood as others are able to interpret our pain and help us in crisis, even if unwittingly.

Though the voluminous weight and influence of a malady can’t be fully remedied, it can be lessened and lightened, but in this case Mrs. Das was looking for something Mr. Kapasi couldn’t give her, a magical cure-all, which reflects that sometimes what we want isn’t what we need or what’s obtainable in our current condition. We, like Mrs. Das, must work through our own messiness and deepness of feeling, torment over past actions, in order to get somewhere instead of short-cutting our way there. In any case, it also comes back to and derives from our own limits in being able to extract truths from each other’s endlessly complex wholes.

“Sexy”:

Although I had mixed feeling about parts of this story, it still stuck out to me in distinctive ways. In ways that I wanted to undress as the characters not only physically but also metaphorically undress each other in the story. What I most enjoyed about “Sexy” is getting to the bottom of what sexy really means in the first place, almost a sweet, sensually pleasing nothing you tell someone you don’t know, which can startle them into thinking you’re closer than you are and understand each other more than you do.

It can fill you with palpable playfulness, rising hope, and delicate, deepening desire, that will imminently come to a pained standstill, especially in this instance since the man is wrongfully betraying the someone that he has already given his word and heart to. This story also looks into what it can mean to fall in love before you really know someone more intimately, like what it is to wake up and live with them day to day, and without that additional knowledge you can’t fully interpret them: as they remain an art piece with elaborately different, more elusive meanings. Which brings one of the themes of this piece full-circle: in different places one thing can have cultural significance and meaning and in another part of the world it does not.

“The Third and Final Continent”:
This was such a poignantly moving tale of burgeoning care and love between a new husband and wife, unexpected, intergenerational connections born, and stepping into a new culture so vividly different from your own.

A man comes to America to work and before his new wife arrives to live with him from India he stays in an apartment with an elderly woman, Mrs. Croft, who influences him greatly in the small amount of time that they know each other. They are both there for each other in ways that they may need it most and imprint on each other a subtle appreciation for the other’s cultural context and background.

And with the everlasting power of his connection with Mrs. Croft, the man also comes to recognize the ways in which he can embrace the journey of getting to know his wife and ultimately see her through new eyes and an accompanying changed perspective for what she has been through. He recognizes in her some similar challenging feelings that he himself has felt and I think that that’s a beautiful moment of empathetic recognition that can be built upon and influence the course of his and his wife’s relationship.

This story left me with a rich appreciation for the feelings that magically soar between us, our capacity to be good and remember others, and what can be the rivetingly powerful impact of the moments we live and who we share them with.

ساده و فوق‌العاده..
ولی راستش دوست دارم با یه هندی در مورد کتاب صحبت کنم، ببینم نظر اون چیه در مورد جزییات کتاب.

I read this book for the Goodread's Book Club Diversity in All Forms! If you would like to join the discussion here is the link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

The author is a fantastic writer and I always enjoy reading her work. However, this book confused me. It jumped around a ton with the characters; going back in time and telling different stories. I had a hard time figuring out who they were talking about and how everyone was linked. The stories were enjoyable and the writing was great. However, I just couldn't keep everyone straight and I didn't understand why all the different stories were being told and that's why this book was 3 stars to me.

"Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant."

That horrible glitch in the Goodreads app caused my review for this book to be deleted as I tried to update my rating.

This is the fifth time this has happened to me, and i know plenty of other users who have been similarly affected. Sort it out, Goodreads.

First published in 1999, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2000 has nine short stories: A Temporary Matter, When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine, Interpreter of Maladies, A Real Durwan, Sexy, Mrs Sen's, This Blessed House, The Treatment of Bibi Haldar and The Third and Final Continent.

The stories talk about how we get caught up in our lives and missing out on the genuine pleasures of life which we keep denying ourselves of, immigrants and culture mix, sentiments and emotions, our beliefs and unsettling human nature, marriages and relationships, memories and moments that matter, home and belongingness.

I read this collection two years ago; I reread it again and it still stands good as one of the best short story collections ever written.

The writing is unique, beautiful and has a voice like it doesn't need many words.

The stories have a deeper meaning to each and are told in a way that you would want more when they end.

This book still stands out bold today. If at all, you've been looking for a short story collection, pick up this book. It has lots to offer.