A pleasant collection of short stories.

My favorites are the following two:

(1) 'A Real Darwan', something I could relate to the social structure in Calcutta, after a touristic trip I made there a few years ago

(2) 'Sexy', a touching story of the painful effects of parental infidelity on a little boy, coming of age.

مجموعه داستان هایی کوتاه و خواندنی وماندگار در ذهن خواننده با ترجمه خوب مژده دقیقی که براساس زندگی و مهاجرت خانواده هایی با ریشه و اصالتی هندی به اروپا وآمریکا به قلم جومپا لاهیری در این کتاب گردآوری شده است و هر داستان حرف ويژه اى براى خود دارد
داستان هایی خواندنی وآمیخته به رنج وغم های زندگی ومسائل مربوط به آن مانند رابطه های زناشوهری وعشقی که از هم گسسته می شود ویا از بعد حادثه ای شکل می گیرد وگرم می شود و...
.داستان یک مسئله موقتی وسومین وآخرین قاره فوق العاده است.
.این مجموعه داستان کوتاه به قدری خوب بود که خواننده را مشتاق مي كند درآینده کتاب های دیگری از این نویسنده آمریکایی وهندی تبار بخواند.

“Interpreter of maladies” evokes that space in limbo, that straddling identity of immigrants trying to start a new life abroad and the cultural displacement they suffer both in their native and adopted countries. Enriched with colorful details of the Indian tradition, cuisine and celebrations, this collection of nine stories addresses the universal struggle of getting adapted to the ways of a foreign homeland without losing one’s original roots.

Lahiri’s prose is fluid and simple, but it more than meets the challenge of building a bridge between two different worlds with amazing precision, delineating a tight-knitted atmosphere that serves as common ground for all the stories. Men and women who strive for balance in arranged marriages, resisting the strain of prolonged homesickness, isolation and guilt; feelings deeply rooted in the complex web of human relationships that alter the way time, place and expectations are perceived.
The characters that populate Lahiri’s world live in the tense duality of being exiles, but proud to have left India to build a prosperous life in the West. Their Indian heritage acts as a catalyzer for all the events that seem to unfold in slow motion like a sequence of images that uphold the solitary confinement of the characters, leading up to an anticlimactic outcome that is muffled by the mundane quality of the troubles that haunt them.

The succinct, restrained expression of Lahiri’s storytelling is gradually accumulated and acquires the poetic force of what has been hinted at but not completely articulated into words; a full world of possibilities that amounts to a summation of silent questions that don’t aspire to be answered.
The future is put on hold in that familiar sensation of not knowing what is going to cross our paths next, maybe an opportunity, maybe a reversal, maybe a caressing whisper that assures us that everything is going to be alright. Or maybe all at once, making a perfect conjunction of imperfect circumstances, just like it happens more often than not in everyday life.
Maybe that’s the reason why Lahiri’s stories sound so intimate and real; because they tell our life stories with all their mundane struggles without dismissing the beauty of their ordinariness.

My library presented me with a tattered, yellowing copy of this book. Its shoddy state soon became irrelevant as I quickly became immersed in this collection of stories. Jhumpa Lahiri's style is elegant, evocative and sweet. Her narratives create an aura of reality and presence for the reader.

In a blurb on the back cover, another of my highly regarded authors,Amy Tan, has stated. "Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person you see and say, 'Read this'-" It seems fitting to quote her here, because both skillfully recount the immigrant and foreign experiences , here or in their native countries.

Lahiri has presented her characters so astutely and with such clarity, that it seems possible to envision individuals as they encounter each event. I felt an attachment and an allure to the people and wished to learn and behold more.

It is difficult to select a favorite in this collection. In the title story, Interpreter of Maladies , Mr. Das was a compelling figure. He had gained this title in his town in India, where he was employed by a physician translating Gujarati to the doctor in attendance. Without his expertise, these patients would be unable to find appropriate assistance or care for their problems. At other times, Mr. Das was a tour guide. During one trip with an American family, he became unrealistically enamored with the wife. It was interesting to observe how this situation was resolved.

The realism and infeasibility of another of life's situations was revealed in Sexy . Miranda, the main character who is an American, has become involved in an affair with a married Indian man. Her emotional state is sensitively chronicled throughout.

As in her later book, Unaccustomed Earth , Lahiri has involved our gustatory senses with her many vivd descriptions of food, either simply as unusual snacks, bowls of cereal, or lavish spreads for families and/or guests. There does not appear to be an area where she was unable to capture and sustain interest in her eloquent voice.

I must issue my gratitude to my Goodreads Friends who urged me to read this fine book by this distinguished author!

This is one of the better collections of short stories I have read. The overarching theme is cultural displacement related to India. My two favorites are Sexy, which is about a romantic encounter that begins in a department store, and The Third and Final Continent, which follows a man from India who relocates to the UK and then to the US.

In Sexy, the main character gets carried away thinking she is getting involved in a fabulous romance. Let us just say her illusions are eventually brought back to reality. The Third and Final Continent is a poignant story that reflects the main character’s discomforts as he adapts to different cultures. It portrays how an eccentric centenarian helps the protagonist without even knowing how much of a difference she has made in his life. It had a big impact on me, and I was amazed that the author could pack so much poignancy into so few pages.

A Temporary Matter – 4 stars
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine – 4
Interpreter of Maladies – 4
A Real Durwan – 2
Sexy - 5
Mrs. Sen’s – 3.5
This Blessed House – 3.5
The Treatment of Bibi Haldar – 3
The Third and Final Continent – 5

اصلا دوست نداشتم این کتاب رو! داستان های معمولی و بی سر و تهی که بیشتر خسته کننده بود تا جذاب یا حتی آموزنده
تنها نکته های مثبت کتاب این بود که فهمیدم ما چقدر خوش شانسیم که به جای هند تو ایران زندگی می کنیم و اینکه زندگی متاهلی ، کسل کننده تر از اون چیزی هست که همیشه فکرش رو می کردم
:))

In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

In her multi-award-winning debut, Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri gives us nine elegantly crafted, even-paced short stories - this is peak traditional storytelling, well done, but unbelievably tame. The characters we meet are mostly caught between two worlds, namely India and the US, and affected by Indian history and politics. Many of them are interesting or even fascinating, but the stories they live through have left me feeling detached far too often: Nothing here will shock or surprise the reader, or even - God forbid - disturb, irritate or agitate audiences. How can something that plays on such a high level be so bland?

The core themes of the stories are universal: Marital troubles, alienation, the ghosts of the past, etc., and there is no doubt that depicting the lives of Indian-Americans is a merit in itself. It would also be hard to point at serious narrative flaws, but I just expect more intensity and narrative force - this is way too safe, especially considering that the author is trying to convey a world of uncertainty.

the Interpreter of *doffs cap* m'ladies

How’s this for blurbs: when the female author published this collection of short stories at age 32 in 1999, she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Hemingway Award and the New Yorker’s Debut Book of the Year.

Like the author’s other collection of shorts that I have reviewed (Unaccustomed Earth, 2008) these stories are about Bengali immigrants in the US from the Bengal area of India, around Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). There are about 250 million Bengalis in the subcontinent, about 2/3 making up the Muslim nation of Bangladesh and about 1/3, mostly Hindus, in West Bengal, a state in India.



But, with the exception of two stories, these folks are not urban slum dogs --they are upper-income folks with PhD’s and MD’s who grew up speaking English in India and who came to the USA to be doctors, professors and engineers in the high-tech beltway bandit firms around Boston. They live in Boston townhouses and upscale suburbs. And there’s a twist to saying these stories are about “immigrants” because most folks in these stories were fully assimilated into the global upper class before they even arrived in the USA.

Here’s a sample of what the nine stories are about:

In the title story, a man who is an interpreter of native Indian languages for a doctor is also a tour guide for visitors to India. He tells this to a Bengali couple, with their kids, visiting from the states. The wife, desperate for someone to confide in, thinks he is like a psychological counselor and pours out her secrets, shocking the tour guide.

In “Mrs. Sen’s,” an eleven-year old boy learns the depth of the loneliness of a Bengali woman in Boston who desperately misses her native country and her large extended family back in India.

“A Real Durwan” is one of two stories set back in India, not in the USA. A poverty-stricken old woman, bent with age, has a job sweeping the stairwell in an apartment building. She sleeps on a pile of rags below the mailboxes. As improvements are made to the building the tenants decide they want a real concierge and toss her onto the street.

In “Sexy,” a young woman listens every day to her co-worker aghast at the infidelity of her cousin’s husband who has left his wife for a younger unmarried woman. Although she and the co-worker are best of friends, the woman can’t tell her that she herself is having an affair with a married Bengali man.

In “This Blessed House,” a young Bengali couple has just moved into a new home and they keep finding posters of Jesus behind closet doors, crosses, statues of Mary in the bushes and nativity scenes in nooks and corner. Over her husband’s objections, the wife collects these and displays them on the mantle. “ ‘We’re not Christian,’ Sanjeev said. Lately he had begun noticing the need to state the obvious to Twinkle.” Sanjeev is an introverted engineer. And it could just be that life-of-the-party Twinkle, despite her poor housekeeping skills, could just be the complementary partner Sanjeev needs if he has sense to hold on to her.

The stories in the author’s collection, Unaccustomed Earth, were very good but Maladies is excellent. No wonder it won so many awards.

Map from portcities.org.uk

It is interesting to reflect on the fact that humans are so mismatched to the lives and people they choose for themselves!

A collection of short stories, navigating the intricate web of cultural clashes in India, UK and USA, moving back and forth in history, from the trauma of the Partition to the moon landing and beyond that, circling around families for twenty pages just to let go of them when the reader thinks the narrative starts to create a pattern of sense, this is a wonderful reading experience! And bizarrely, the loosely connected short stories seem to match well in their description of misfits.

Why do we live with people we don't feel belong to us, with people who try to suppress what we value as treasures rather than celebrating with us?

Why is a close relationship so often similar to an act of slow suffocation?

Can we blame it on the custom of arranged marriages, which appear in some of the stories? Hardly, for the marriages that were founded on physical attraction generate the same issues. Can we blame it on the institution of marriage itself? Hardly, for the role of mistress is just as difficult to bear. Can we make it a gender issue? Hardly, for husbands are not exempt from the suffocation, even though they may have slightly more freedom of movement. Can we blame it on a specific culture? Hardly, for humans are humans whether they live in deepest poverty in Calcutta or in brilliant luxury in a university town in New England.

Funnily, the character who seemed to develop the most strength and inner happiness in the end was the sick young woman in India who was rejected by everyone, even her family, and who found herself pregnant and forced to raise a child on her own in "disgrace".

She was "cured".

Cured of her seizures, cured of the pressure to adapt to the expectations of others. Cured of trying to be matched, she formed her own pattern.

Brilliant stories, wonderfully human!

As a number of reviewers before me have commented Don't get this from Audible! I did it only because I needed to read it quickly for book club. It seems like this was originally published on cassette tapes and then uploaded to digital. There are strange breaks with music that are non-sensical. My only guess is these are the places where you had to switch out the cassettes. The narrator is not very good at changing voices, especially male voices.

This book is a collection of short stories about ordinary people, mostly Bengalis (Calcutta). Some are American immigrants living in Boston, while some of the stories take place in Bengal. Many of the stories are about mundane situations, but the author makes you care about the individuals.

4-stars for the stories. 2-stars for the Audible version.