Interpreter of Maladies is a book collection of nine short stories by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri published in 2000 It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation in the year 2001 and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. It was also chosen as The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year and is on Oprah Winfrey's Top Ten Book List. The stories are about the lives of Indians and Indian Americans who are caught between their roots and the "New World." Most of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories emphasize on the lives of Indo Americans, and the short stories in Interpreter of Maladies are set in India or part of the US, including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an anonymous university town very much like Cambridge. In her
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here she concentrates on the Indian society and the Indo immigrants. The difficulties faced by them in adapting new lifestyle, culture etc. The prominent theme in her short stories consists of Love and marriage are twisted in Interpreter of Maladies. A marriage is the beginning of a new combined life for two people. In these stories, a marriage is an event of joy but also of secrets, silences, and mysteries. Twinkle and Sanjeev's relationship shows the disparate attitudes and attributes of marriage in Lahiri's short stories collection. Although they are American by birth and their marriage is not arranged, Twinkle and Sanjeev are nearly strangers to each other. No matter what romantic feelings bubbles within couples, each husband and wife in the stories remain individuals, each having their own secrets and desires. Sanjeev questions his love for his wife because of this disconnects. But, as it is proved by the narrator of The Third and Final Continent, that distance relationship can be closed by shared experience. In the story A Temporary Matter,Shukumar and Shoba are deeply altered by the death of their child, and the effect is taken on their marriage. They are no longer the same people as when they met in the beginning. Love is found in unexpected places and can shift in the blink of experience. By reading Sexy from the view point of a mistress, the reader also …show more content…
Interpreter of Maladies garnered universal acclaim from myriad publications. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times praises Lahiri for her writing style, citing her "uncommon elegance and poise." Time applauded the collection for "illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships with lovers, family friends, those met in travel". Ronny Noor asserts, "The value of these stories although some of them are loosely constructed lies into fact that they transcend confined borders of immigrant experience to embrace larger age old issues that are, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'cast into the mould of these new times' redefining America." Williams notes that Indian-American literature is under-represented and that Lahiri deliberately tries to give a diverse view of Indian Americans so as not to brand the group as a whole. She also argues that Interpreter of Maladies is not just a collection of random short stories that have common components, but a "short story cycle" in which the themes and motifs are intentionally connected to produce a cumulative effect on the reader: " a deeper look reveals the intricate use of pattern and motif to bind the stories together, including recurring themes of the barriers to and opportunities for human communication; community, including marital, extra-marital, and parent-child relationships; and the dichotomy of care and neglect." The Interpreter of Maladies as reflecting the trauma of
here she concentrates on the Indian society and the Indo immigrants. The difficulties faced by them in adapting new lifestyle, culture etc. The prominent theme in her short stories consists of Love and marriage are twisted in Interpreter of Maladies. A marriage is the beginning of a new combined life for two people. In these stories, a marriage is an event of joy but also of secrets, silences, and mysteries. Twinkle and Sanjeev's relationship shows the disparate attitudes and attributes of marriage in Lahiri's short stories collection. Although they are American by birth and their marriage is not arranged, Twinkle and Sanjeev are nearly strangers to each other. No matter what romantic feelings bubbles within couples, each husband and wife in the stories remain individuals, each having their own secrets and desires. Sanjeev questions his love for his wife because of this disconnects. But, as it is proved by the narrator of The Third and Final Continent, that distance relationship can be closed by shared experience. In the story A Temporary Matter,Shukumar and Shoba are deeply altered by the death of their child, and the effect is taken on their marriage. They are no longer the same people as when they met in the beginning. Love is found in unexpected places and can shift in the blink of experience. By reading Sexy from the view point of a mistress, the reader also …show more content…
Interpreter of Maladies garnered universal acclaim from myriad publications. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times praises Lahiri for her writing style, citing her "uncommon elegance and poise." Time applauded the collection for "illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships with lovers, family friends, those met in travel". Ronny Noor asserts, "The value of these stories although some of them are loosely constructed lies into fact that they transcend confined borders of immigrant experience to embrace larger age old issues that are, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'cast into the mould of these new times' redefining America." Williams notes that Indian-American literature is under-represented and that Lahiri deliberately tries to give a diverse view of Indian Americans so as not to brand the group as a whole. She also argues that Interpreter of Maladies is not just a collection of random short stories that have common components, but a "short story cycle" in which the themes and motifs are intentionally connected to produce a cumulative effect on the reader: " a deeper look reveals the intricate use of pattern and motif to bind the stories together, including recurring themes of the barriers to and opportunities for human communication; community, including marital, extra-marital, and parent-child relationships; and the dichotomy of care and neglect." The Interpreter of Maladies as reflecting the trauma of