interpreter of maladies by jhumpa lahiri

Similar to my own, their names are unfamiliar and foreign on the Western tongue – certainly not ones you’d find in my former readings lists, but ones you’d have to learn to enunciate slowly and repeat twice for people to remember.

It appears in the everyday: their food, their clothes, and perhaps most prominently, in their names. Like many South Asian writers exploring diaspora, Lahiri’s characters’ South Asian culture is a backdrop to their stories.

But a new literary world opened up for me after reading Interpreter of Maladies. As such, over time, this resulted in an unsettling disconnection between myself and the fiction I was reading. Before reading Lahiri’s work, my reading list (both personal and academic) consisted of the likes of Austen, Shelley, and Fitzgerald – Romantic and Modernist writers whose works, either implicitly or explicitly, marked white characters as default against racialized ‘Others’. Interpreter of Maladies was my introduction to South Asian diasporic fiction. And given my own history of such attempts (having been born in Nepal, raised in Canada, and now living in Scotland), it didn’t take long for my aforementioned communion to develop with Lahiri’s stories. Lahiri explores the lives of Indian immigrants, attempting to bridge the gap between two places that are simultaneously foreign and familiar – places that are of belonging and of isolation. And since first reading her collection, my relationship with her work has developed into one of communion – one of personal and emotional resonance. I first came across Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies while in search of more female South Asian voices in literature.

Interpreter of maladies by jhumpa lahiri