5+++++++++++ stars...
As Mrs Croft said"SPLENDID" :D

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.

Total average rating:

'Interpreter of Maladies' is a debut novel by the author Jhumpa Lahiri that won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a collection of 9 short stories based on the experiences of Indian immigrants; some stories are set in India while others, abroad. The stories cover a wide range of themes ranging from marriage, family, cultural identity, social class, past, dreams, and hopes about the future, communication etc.

The language is simple, yet subtle. The emotions are not directly expressed but they are meant to be felt and interpreted from the writing itself. The stories possess a certain Indian-ness as we get a glimpse of Indian culture. What I loved about this book is that the characters are flawed and their emotions and experiences are portrayed very realistically. Each story is unique and revolves around the life of ordinary people. The writing transcends the boundary of culture to portray universal emotions of love, loss, hope which are relatable.

While I loved some of the stories, others, I did not care for much. At certain times, it was difficult for me to get emotionally invested in the characters and their story. I felt the stories start off great and have a nice build-up but they end abruptly, failing to reach that emotional crescendo I wanted. As a result, I was left disappointed.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed some of the stories which include:
The first story called ‘The temporary matter’ which is about a married couple struggling to deal with a tragic loss. It’s a beautiful story about coming to terms with the loss and moving on.
‘The Real Durwan’ is about Boori Ma, a gatekeeper, who lives in, and works as the caretaker of a middle-class apartment. This story gives a sad and accurate depiction of the class difference in India.
‘The Treatment of Bibi Haldar’ depicts the sad life of Bibi Haldar suffering from a mysterious illness who believes she’ll be cured by a man’s love. This story depicts the support and importance of community life.
‘The Third and Final Continent’ in which the narrator who’s an immigrant reminisce about the past and ponders upon the life he has created.

Overall, it’s a nice collection of short stories. The writing felt flat at times but some stories are very good. I’d love to give The Namesake a try and see if I’m wrong. This turned out to be a good read and now, I'm willing to read some good Indian literature.

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...

Lost, left alone in a country not yours. With no one to call family. Being stranded in a place surrounded by people you can’t call your own, being looked at by disgust because you possess a color different to theirs. It’s not your choice, I’m your heart you do not feel different to the man sitting next to you on the metro having color several shades lighter than you. You breathe the same air, you came into this world the same way, you speak the same language. In truth you are able to speak several tongues, doesn’t that mean you are intellectual? Why do they look down you?

But not everyone’s like that. Some embrace you with open arms, they take you into their bosom, consider you friends, their own family. Some are too good to you, even more than your own family. But that’s a handful. Still you don’t feel as a part of this world. You ache within for your own country, the place you call your motherland. Motherland, even the word brings out emotions too strong to express in words. But you can’t turn back. Because you took that choice yourself, you can’t turn back, you cannot.

We all have the same sorts of stories

I usually don't enjoy short stories that much. Collections of short stories tend to have stories that are really strong mixed together with ones that aren't and this was no exception. I do think the foreward for the kindle edition that I had contributed a lot to my enjoyment of the stories. It really helped frame a connecting thread through out each story and tied it back to the title of the collection. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed the stories as much without having the foreward highlight the themes to look for or without it explaining what made the collection great. I find that often that is the case, like i definitely wouldn't have understood the significance and enjoyment of Don Quixote without the foreward. I do find short stories a lot less satisfying than novels though, they lack a certain build up and depth usually that I would get with a novel, and I tend to find the endings to them to feel much less strong. I don't think the last story, The Third and Final Continent, was that great and definetly felt like one of the weakest. I did like The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, This Blessed House, Mrs. Sen's, Interpreter of Maladies, and When Mr.Pirzada Came to Diner to name a few. I might be forgetting some. Anyway the book definitely did a good job exploring themes of cultural differences, living in diaspora, and a general malaise of life. A 4.5 stars for this one.

This was the first thing I read from Jhumpa Lahiri way back in the late 2000s, and unfortunately, I'm a little less enthused the second time around. Just a tad. Still, out of the 9 stories here, there are about 4 that are truly fabulous, and I would still recommend the whole thing to anyone interested in her work or interested in reading short stories.
The best one here is the first story, “A Temporary Matter” about a married couple who receive a notice from their electric company that their power will be disconnected for five days from 8:00-9:00 P.M. in order to repair a power line damaged in a snowstorm, and is the one that I see myself coming back to, above all the others, in the future.

Amazing, extraordinary - there aren't enough superlatives for this one!

The first story, A Temporary Matter tells of a young married couple who must endure a one hour power outage for five consecutive nights. They determine that in the darkness they will tell each other something they've never before told one another. In just a few pages Lahiri exposes the secret feelings of these individuals. And then she ends the story in a completely unexpected way. Rarely will I gasp while reading, though shedding tears is commonplace. I did both.

Lahiri also has a way of seeing and describing ordinary objects in a new and different way - new to me anyway. In a later story, this sentence I read and reread:

The beach was barren and dull to play on alone; the only neighbors who stayed on past Labor Day, a young married couple, had no children, and Eliot no longer found it interesting to gather broken mussel shells in his bucket, or to stroke the seaweed, strewn like strips of emerald lasagna on the sand.

Emerald lasagna is such a perfect description. Never again will I see seaweed without thinking of this story of Eliot and Mrs. Sen, who wouldn't learn to drive, who chopped vegetables with her special knife from "home" and who wanted whole fish to cook.

Each of the nine stories in Interpreter of Maladies shares people in slightly different situations. Lahiri's characters are ordinary people made extraordinary. They lead simple lives, but see life as special. She makes it special for me.

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.

أول مجموعة قصصية للكاتبة جومبا لاهيري
أسلوب جميل وهادئ في الحكي عن مشاهد من حياة المغتربين الهنود
تجمع لاهيري التفاصيل الخاصة والعامة لترسم عوالم الشخصيات
في كل قصة صورة من العلاقات والهموم والمشاعر وضغوط الواقع
وتتناول خلال السرد مفردات الهجرة.. الاغتراب والحنين والثقافات المختلفة