Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jhumpa LahiriEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-05-22
ISBN: 0618101365
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Book Reviews of Interpreter of Maladies
Book Review: Glimpses of Indian-American Diaspora
Summary: 5 Stars
Reviewed by C. J. Singh
Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," a collection of nine stories, marked the debut of a remarkable Indian-American writer. A grand debut it was! Her title story was selected for both the O'Henry award and the annual Best American Short Stories. Topping this, the book won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Born in London of Indian parents and raised in Rhode Island, Jhumpa Lahiri studied at Boston University, receiving an MFA in creative writing. The stories in her first book focus on the intercultural miscommunications and conflicts all too often experienced by Indian immigrants and second generation Indian-Americans.
"Interpreter of Maladies," at 27 pages the longest in the collection, is a multi-layered story about a second-generation Indian-American couple, who along with their three children are visiting India and hire a tour-guide to see the famous Sun Temple at Konarak. Their guide, Mr. Kapasi (we never learn his first name), becomes curious about the couple who look Indian, yet dress like American tourists and speak with an American accent he had heard many times on American TV shows.
The opening sentences expose the bickering that symptomizes the couple's failing marriage. Mr. Kapasi works as a tour guide only on weekends, and has another job during the weekdays as an interpreter in a doctor's office -- translating the Gujarati spoken by some of his patients. Mina Das, the wife tells him that his job as an interpreter of maladies must be "romantic."
Perked up, Mr. Kapasi, from whose point of view the whole story is told and whose own marriage is faltering, looks at her closely: "Her sudden interest in him, an interest she did not express in either her husband or her children, was mildly intoxicating. When Mr. Kapasi thought once again about how she had said 'romantic,' the feeling of intoxication grew." He begins to fantasize a romantic relationship with her.
The couple invite him to be included in the photographs they take; Mina asks him for his address so they can send him copies from America. This feeds his fantasy.
At the crisis point of the story, when the two of them are in the car, Mina discloses (the author uses the word "confesses") to Mr. Kapasi that one of the couple's two boys was clandestinely fathered by her husband's Punjabi-Indian friend during a brief visit. This is the malady which she hopes Mr. Kapasi will provide a remedy for. However, all the interpreter of maladies can come up with is: "Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?" After all, he is only a translator of native languages.
In the closing paragraph, Mr. Kapasi observes the little paper on which he had so carefully written his address slip out of Mina's handbag. "No one but Mr. Kapasi noticed. He watched as it rose, carried higher and higher by the breeze, into the trees where the monkeys now sat, solemnly observing the scene below. Mr. Kapasi observed it too, knowing that this was the picture of the Das family he would preserve forever in his mind."
"The Third and Final Continent" is a first-person story of an Indian immigrant who looks back at his first few weeks in America, thirty years ago. In the late 1960s, at age thirty-six, he arrives to work as a librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after having studied for four years in London (his second continent). Just before coming to America, he takes a trip to Calcutta to "attend" his arranged marriage, staying there only a week, barely getting acquainted with his bride. She has to await her visa for six weeks before she can join him in America.
On arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the narrator checks into the local YMCA and later rents a room in the home of a 103-year-old widow, Mrs. Croft, who lives by herself. She is a stay-at-home eccentric mother of a 68-year-old daughter, who thinks it improper that her visiting daughter wears a dress high above her ankle. "For your information, Mother, it's 1969. What would you do if you actually left the house one day and saw a girl in a miniskirt?" Mrs. Croft sniffs: "I'd have her arrested."
When the narrator's wife, Mala, arrives from Calcutta, Mrs. Croft scrutinizes her "from top to toe with what seemed to be placid disdain. I wondered if Mrs. Croft had ever seen a woman in a sari, with a dot painted on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists. I wondered what she would object to. I wondered if she could see the red dye still vivid on Mala's feet, all but obscured by the bottom edge of her sari. At last Mrs. Croft declared, with equal measure of disbelief and delight I know well: 'She is a perfect lady!' "
It is this scrutiny that first evokes the narrator's empathy with his bride for it reminds him of his own experiences as a bewildered stranger in London. Looking back, "I like to think of that moment in Mrs. Croft's parlor as the moment when the distance between Mala and me began to lessen."
All nine of the stories are a showcase of elegant craft.
Summary of Interpreter of Maladies
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.
Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection. Take, for example, Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A Temporary Matter" whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn child. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. His fare on this particular day is Mr. and Mrs. Das--first-generation Americans of Indian descent--and their children. During the course of the afternoon, Mr. Kapasi becomes enamored of Mrs. Das and then becomes her unwilling confidant when she reads too much into his profession. "I told you because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling secret.
I'm tired of feeling so terrible all the time. Eight years, Mr. Kapasi, I've been in pain eight years. I was hoping you could help me feel better; say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.Of course, Mr. Kapasi has no cure for what ails Mrs. Das--or himself. Lahiri's subtle, bittersweet ending is characteristic of the collection as a whole. Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Yet the situations Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend ethnicity. As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final Continent," comments: "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." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. --Alix Wilber
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