Interpreter of Maladies

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Overview

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD WINNER.

With a new foreword by Domenico Starnone, this stunning debut collection flawlessly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.

With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. 

A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.

Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547487069
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/22/2000
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Lexile:	1050L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani (Roman Stories). She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. 

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1967

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University

Read an Excerpt

Sarah Rees Brennan was born in Ireland by the sea. After world travel and surviving stage four cancer, she settled there in the shadow of a three-hundred-year-old library. Writing young adult fiction, she was a Lodestar, Mythopoeic and World Fantasy finalist, Carnegie nominee and New York Times bestseller. Long Live Evil is her first adult work.

Table of Contents

A Temporary Matter When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine Interpreter Of Maladies A Real Durwan Sexy Mrs. Sen's This Blessed House The Treatment Of Bibi Haldar The Third and Final Continent

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Lahiri] announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice. Indeed, Ms. Lahiri's prose is so eloquent and assured that the reader easily forgets the 'Interpreter of Maladies' is a young writer's first book...Ms. Lahiri chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise, and with 'Interpreter of Maldies' she has made a precocious debut." The New York Times

"Lahiri's touch in these nine tales is delicate, but her observations remain damningly accurate, and her bittersweet stories are unhampered by nostalgia..." Publishers Weekly

"Lahiri's touch is delicate yet assured, leaving no room for flubbed notes or forced epiphanies." The Los Angeles Times

"Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation...Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives...[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers." USA Today

"[S]torytelling of surpassing kindness and skill." The San Francisco Chronicle

"India is an inescapable presence in this strong first collection's nine polished and resonant tales, most of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications." Kirkus Reviews

Editorial Reviews

...[Lahiri] announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice....[She] chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise...a precocious debut.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

...[The stories have] very unHollywood-like denouements that are Lahiri's trademark — endings with multiple stray ends that leave you asking what happened next. Kind of like in real life.
—AsianWeek

Heather Harlan

Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation...Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives...[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers.

USA Today

The experience of being foreign and the need for connection both mark Lahiri's outstanding debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in which intimacy is often the odd consequences of her character's admitting how distant they have become, or always were.
— New York

Ariel Levy

There is not one false note here, not one misstep or hestiation....[E]ach of these nine stories has the capacity to amaze us...

Her subject is not love's failure...but the opportunity that an artful spouse (like an artful writer) can make of failure....She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics.
— The New York Times Book Review

Caleb Crain

Lahiri's language is uncluttered; she's sparing with metaphor, and the riches accumulate unobtrusively.
— Newsweek

Laura Shapiro

...in her wondrous tales, Lahiri depicts Indian-Americans struggling with their connections to the India of their memory. Although their ties to the country differ in degree, Lahiri's characters all interpret their maladies of the heart through their cultural identity.
—Time Out New York

Freeman

Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories helps us understand what it means to suffer the loss of strong cultural support in the melding of today's world.

Natural Home Magazine

What makes Lahiri's debut collection of stories stand out is precisely its quality of unexpected ordinariness. Its not that these tales of Americanized Indians are themselves ordinary...It's the familiarity of the world Lahiri captures...that distinguishes the books...Brimming with promise, Lahiri has a knack for exposing the silent sacrifices and small moments of ridiculousness of people navigating between two worlds.
—Time Out NY

Anderson Tepper

India is an inescapable presence in this strong first collection's nine polished and resonant tales, most of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications. Lahiri, who was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island, offers stories that stress the complex mechanics of adjustment to new circumstances, relationships, and cultures. Sometimes they're narrated by outside observers like the flatmates of an "excited" (presumably epileptic) young woman "cured" by "relations" with men (in "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar"); the preadolescent American schoolboy cared for at "Mrs. Sen's," where the eponymous immigrant is tortured by the pressure of adapting to American ways; or, most compellingly, the Indian-American girl emotionally touched and subtly matured by the kindness her parents show to a Pakistani friend who fears for the safety of his family back home amid civil war ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine"). Richly detailed portrayals of young marriages dominate tales like that of an Indian emigrant's oddly fulfilling relationship with his landlady, a bellicose centenarian ("The Third and Final Continent"); "This Blessed House," in which the wedge afflicting a young couple is widened when they discover "Christian paraphernalia" left behind by their home's former owners; and "A Temporary Matter," which delicately traces how a pair of academics, continually mourning their stillborn baby, find in "an exchange of confessions" a renewal of their intimacy. Lahiri is equally skilled with more sophisticated plots, as in her title story's seriocomic disclosure of a middle-aged tour guide's self-delusive romance, or in the complexity of "Sexy," about a young American woman who's fascinated notonly by her married Bengali lover but by all other things Indian–including the manner in which she is and isn't deflected from her passion by an afternoon with an Indian boy victimized by his own father's infidelity. Moving and authoritative pictures of culture shock and displaced identity.

Kirkus Reviews

A writer of uncommon sensitivity and restraint.”—Wall Street Journal “Lahiri breathers unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finished each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters.”—The New York Times Book Review “Lahiri's touch is delicate yet assured, leaving no room for flubbed notes or forced epiphanies.”—The Los Angeles Times “A writer of uncommon elegance and poise.”—New York times “Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation...Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives...[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers.”—USA Today “[S]torytelling of surpassing kindness and skill.”—The San Francisco Chronicle “Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person you see and say, ‘Read this!’”—Amy Tan   —

From the Publisher