I for one happen to love Munro therefore liked Lahiri very much indeed.Īnd it's true, the book has the faults all short stories collections usually suffer from: read in isolation, each story is interesting, even startling. Jhumpa Lahiri lists the great Alice Munro among her literary heroes and the influence is easy to detect. The ruthlessly economical language, overall, does risk creating the impression of cold detachment. And Lahiri's observations are superb: fascinating, wonderfully detailed insights into exotic but everyday lives. Yet what the characters symbolize is universal and they illuminate the human condition they stay with you long after you've read them. The language is unfussy and so are the characters - ordinary people caught in snippets of their ordinary lives. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.īoth the writing and the plotting are elegant and deceptively simple, and Ms Lahiri's short stories are a (gentle) pleasure to read. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.
In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. 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. 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.
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