Tag: Jhumpa Lahiri

Review 2733: Literary Wives! Interpreter of Maladies

~ whatmeread ~ 14 Comments

Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

This month we’re saying goodbye to Naomi of Consumed By Ink, who has been a member of the club for a long time. Good luck, Naomi!

My Review

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories mostly about Indian or Pakistani immigrants but a few about residents in India. Only a few of the stories seem suitable for our discussion purposes in Literary Wives.

In “A Temporary Matter,” married couple Shoba and Shukumar deal with the consequences to their marriage of the death of their baby in a premature birth. During a Boston winter, the city announces planned power outages in their neighborhood. They find that they are able to talk in the darkness lit by candlelight.

In “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dinner” a woman remembers a man from Dacca who lost everything in the war for Bangladesh. He has had no contact for some time with his wife and daughters. Ten-year-old Lilia’s parents invite him to dinner every night, and then they watch the news.

The “Interpreter of Maladies” is an English-speaking tour guide taking Mr. and Mrs. Das and their children around an area of India. Although they look Indian, they act and dress like American tourists, and Mr. Kapasi learns they were born in America. When Mrs. Das learns Mr. Kapasi also works as an interpreter of Gujarati in a doctor’s office, she seems to misunderstand his function.

“A Real Durwan” is the story of Boori Ma, who lives in a storage room on the roof of an apartment building and sweeps the stairs. She speaks of a better life before the Partition, but disaster strikes when her quilts are ruined in a storm. This story seems to be about the incomprehension of the better off for the difficulties of the very poor.

Back in the States again, Laxmi tells her friend Miranda about her cousin’s problems in “Sexy.” Her cousin’s husband has met another woman and is leaving her. Miranda has kept secret her affair with a married Indian man named Dev, but her encounter with Laxmi’s cousin’s young son makes her re-evaluate her affair.

In “Mrs. Sen’s,” young Eliot stays with Mrs. Sen after school every day. She is having a hard time adjusting to life in the U. S., especially the isolation and difficulties shopping because she doesn’t drive.

Twinkle keeps discovering gaudy religious artifacts in the house she and Sanjeev have bought—statues and large pictures of Jesus and shrines in the yard in “This Blessed House.” `She thinks they’re hilarious and puts them on display. He thinks they should dispose of them because they’re not Christians and worries about what people will think. Sanjeev is a very successful management type who has married after short acquaintance because it’s time. But he is disturbed by Twinkle’s outgoing personality. A house-warming party helps him look at her another way.

Another roof dweller in India is the subject of “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” a woman who suffers from seizures. After charms and homeopathic remedies fail to heal her, one practitioner recommends marriage. But her brother and sister-in-law don’t want to spend the money to marry her off and she is eventually forced to live in the rooftop shed because her sister-in-law is afraid her condition is contagious.

In “The Third and Final Continent,” an Indian man marries before taking a job in an MIT library in 1964. The summer before his wife arrives, he takes a room in the house of a 100-year-old woman.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

Actually, when the story is about marriage, it is more often from the point of view of the husband. Only a few of these stories lend themselves to our usual discussion, and anyway in Lahiri’s stories, more things are implied than stated. But certainly the isolation immigrants experience in the States is a common theme of much of her work, and that isolation often reflects itself in the characters’ marriages.

In “A Temporary Matter,” the marriage of Shukumar and Shoba was apparently a love match, and now it is foundering because of the death of their baby in a premature birth. When the two begin talking by candlelight, Shukumar seems to be hoping they can become closer again, but Shuba is leading up to something else. Noticeable in this story is Shukumar’s incomprehension.

The glimpse that Mr. Kapasi gets into the Das’s marriage in “Interpreter of Maladies” isn’t one he wants, but why does Mrs. Das confide in him in the first place? This story is more, though, about Mr. Kapasi’s lack of understanding of the type of person Mrs. Das is.

“This Blessed House” is about a newly married couple trying to understand each other, or more particularly, Sanjeev’s lack of understanding of Twinkle. I have noticed that Lahiri often works from the man’s point of view when observing marriage, and she does so again here. Sanjeev is so worried about what other people think that it takes a party at his house, in which his guests clearly like and admire his wife, for him to start to appreciate her qualities.

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In “The Third and Final Continent,” the unnamed narrator has married Mala, a woman he hardly knows. When she arrives from India, it is his relationship with old Mrs. Croft that brings out her first smile.

Culture shock and isolation are big themes in Lahiri’s literature, and many of the marriages she examines seem to be filled with incomprehension and more isolation. But not all. In her looks at marriage, she seems to be saying we’re all strangers to each other and some of us can bridge the gap while others cannot.

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Unaccustomed Earth

The Lowland

The Namesake

Day 698: The Namesake

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Cover for The NamesakeIn 1968, Ashima Ganguli gives birth to her first child. She has travelled from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with her husband, whom she barely knows, and is missing her family in India. When she has a boy, she and her husband Ashoke run into difficulty because they are waiting for a name to arrive from her grandmother. But the American hospital needs to put a name on the birth certificate. Finally, Ashoke picks Gogol, after Nikolai Gogol, a favorite author whom he credits with saving his life after a horrendous train accident when he was a young man.

Gogol grows up embarrassed by his name and rejecting the traditions of his Bengali parents. He is bored through the endless Saturdays spent with his parents’ Bengali friends and the biennial trips to India where they do almost nothing but visit family. His mother, on the other hand, has never stopped missing India. His parents want him to observe the customs of his homeland, while he just wants to be American.

This novel insightfully explores the stresses for Indian immigrants adjusting to American ways and the tensions between the traditional and the present for their first-generation American children. Lahiri’s prose is full of minutely observed details as well as empathy for both generations.

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The Lowland

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Day 471: Unaccustomed Earth

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Cover for Unaccustomed EarthBest Book of the Week!

Although all of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth feature characters who are immigrants and first-generation Americans of Indian descent, they are about a lot more than that. They are about the common problems of all people.

In the story “Unaccustomed Earth,” Ruma grieves over the loss of her mother while her father fears she is making the same life for herself that embittered his marriage to her mother. In “Hell-Heaven,” a girl observes her traditional mother’s infatuation with a young graduate student in light of her mother’s detached marriage with her father. Amit and his wife Megan try to create a romantic weekend while attending the wedding of a woman Amit once had a crush on in “A Choice of Accommodations.” The best of the stories are the last three, interlinked, about two people who meet each other several times at significant junctures of their lives.

Lahiri’s stories speak to us deeply. With details of life and human behavior so finely observed, they become stories about characters for whom we care.

I am generally a novel reader, because short stories often feel to me as if a lot is missing. But Lahiri’s gift is for saying so much in so few words. You find yourself pondering her stories and characters long after you stop reading. They reveal a profound insight into the human heart.

Day 416: The Lowland

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Cover for The LowlandBest Book of the Week!
Today we have a treat–one of the novels that made the short list for this year’s Booker Prize.

As boys in Calcutta, brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable, even though their personalities are so different. Udayan, the younger boy, is bold, reckless, and charismatic. Subhash is quiet and responsible.

As they reach college age, Subhash dedicates himself to his studies while Udayan becomes involved with the Naxalites, an obscure radical leftist group that takes its name from solidarity with the poor farmers of Naxalbari who rose up against their landlords in 1967. Subhash, who is apolitical, stays away from these activities and soon goes to Rhode Island to attend graduate school.

Subhash is called back to India because Udayan is dead. He returns to a home of grief, where his parents hardly speak to him or move from their balcony overlooking the street, where his mother goes out periodically to tend the small stone marker in the Lowland, a marshland where the boys had played and where the police shot Udayan in custody.

Subhash’s parents do not speak to his brother’s wife Gauri, and soon he understands that they hope to drive her away and take custody of her unborn child. So, Subhash offers to marry her and bring her back to the States so that he can care for her and the child. Gauri agrees.

Although Lahiri chooses to begin her novel in turbulent times, both in India and the United States, where demonstrations against Vietnam are taking place, her characters seem distanced from this activity, even though their lives are irrevocably changed by what happened in India. Incidents are described, but at a level that seems far removed from their reality. Only at the very end of the novel do we understand Udayan’s viewpoint, and it is just of the last few moments of his life.

I don’t know if this is a criticism, though. This novel is not so much about these political activities as about Udayan’s actions and their results, about the emotions that arise from them. The novel is about the complexities of grief and how they evoke other emotions–anger, isolation, inertia. As Maureen Corrigan remarks in her review of Unaccustomed Earth, “All that lushness electrifyingly evokes the void.” In The Lowland, we’re not so much faced with lushness as a marshy wasteland. This wasteland is in itself a metaphor. In the monsoon season it is one marsh, but when it becomes drier, it is separated into two ponds, just as Subhash and Udayan, and later Subhash and Gauri, are together and separate, each failing to comprehend the other.

Finally, the novel is about betrayal. Spanning more than 50 years and four generations, this novel, apparently broad in scope, is actually more concerned with private and personal tragedies. It evokes an atmosphere that is at once poignant and arid.