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If you are a lover of the short story, you will hug this book. It is a perfect rendition of the form, with characters who are driven by osmosis. No wonder it won the Pulitzer.
There are a lot of things Lahiri does so well that I enjoyed. Things that made me stay with this collection, finishing it in one day. Did she use her stories to inform of the Indian Diaspora, one wonders? Oh no, not fiction writers, they are not supposed to write with some agenda...blah blah. Well if she didn't mean to be so translucent, she surely ended up being just that. And I loved it. The India-Pakistan Partition, Indian immigrant struggles, religion, arranged marriages, economically and socially dependent wives, were all topics explored.
Well hello thematic appeal, why do all collections not abide by you?
The writing is unadorned: terse prose with sporadic use of metaphors. You don't get a weather-man-like one-page description that makes you want to scream, stoppp, just tell me the story already. You get a stark sentence: "the rain had stopped and now the sour smell that rises from wet mango leaves was hanging low over the alley."
The characters don't just have green cards, they have "sixth preference" green cards. They don't just smoke cigarettes, they "smoke Rothmans." They don't just wear shoes, they wear, "black-patent leather mules with heels like golf tees, open toes, and slightly soiled silk labels on the instep where her soles had rested." They don't just experience windy days, they experience a "wind so strong that they had to walk backward." Mrs. Sen didn't just clean fish. She "stroked the tails, prodded the bellies, pried apart the gutted flesh. With a pair of scissors, she clipped the fins. She tucked a finger under the gills, a red so bright they made her vermillion seem pale" (now if you've ever cleaned and gutted fish before, you're smiling slightly at this imagery).
Every word is carefully placed, each character propelled by a journey.
I loved them all but my favorites were:
A Real Durwan- I really liked the mystery of Boori Ma, the woman who always told people about what she had lost after she was deported to Calcutta. Was she really a riches-to-rags woman or a simple stairwell sweeper? Tell me more, please.
Mrs. Sen's--a homesick woman with an aloof husband, takes cares of a young boy with an aloof mother.
When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine-loved the historical context given through dialogue.
There are a lot of things Lahiri does so well that I enjoyed. Things that made me stay with this collection, finishing it in one day. Did she use her stories to inform of the Indian Diaspora, one wonders? Oh no, not fiction writers, they are not supposed to write with some agenda...blah blah. Well if she didn't mean to be so translucent, she surely ended up being just that. And I loved it. The India-Pakistan Partition, Indian immigrant struggles, religion, arranged marriages, economically and socially dependent wives, were all topics explored.
Well hello thematic appeal, why do all collections not abide by you?
The writing is unadorned: terse prose with sporadic use of metaphors. You don't get a weather-man-like one-page description that makes you want to scream, stoppp, just tell me the story already. You get a stark sentence: "the rain had stopped and now the sour smell that rises from wet mango leaves was hanging low over the alley."
The characters don't just have green cards, they have "sixth preference" green cards. They don't just smoke cigarettes, they "smoke Rothmans." They don't just wear shoes, they wear, "black-patent leather mules with heels like golf tees, open toes, and slightly soiled silk labels on the instep where her soles had rested." They don't just experience windy days, they experience a "wind so strong that they had to walk backward." Mrs. Sen didn't just clean fish. She "stroked the tails, prodded the bellies, pried apart the gutted flesh. With a pair of scissors, she clipped the fins. She tucked a finger under the gills, a red so bright they made her vermillion seem pale" (now if you've ever cleaned and gutted fish before, you're smiling slightly at this imagery).
Every word is carefully placed, each character propelled by a journey.
I loved them all but my favorites were:
A Real Durwan- I really liked the mystery of Boori Ma, the woman who always told people about what she had lost after she was deported to Calcutta. Was she really a riches-to-rags woman or a simple stairwell sweeper? Tell me more, please.
Mrs. Sen's--a homesick woman with an aloof husband, takes cares of a young boy with an aloof mother.
When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine-loved the historical context given through dialogue.
"Mr. Picada is no longer considered Indian," my father announced, brushing salt from the cashews out of his trim black beard. Not since Partition. Our country was divided. 1947."
When I said I thought that was the date of India's independence from Britain, my father said, "That too. One moment we were free and then we were sliced up, " he explained, drawing an X with his finger on the countertop, "like a pie. Hindus here, Muslims there. Dacca no longer belongs to us."
