INTERPRETER OF MALADIES: Interpreting subtle ties and cultural clash

The young writer Jhumpa Lahiri bears a huge responsibility. Not only because her debut “Interpreter of Maladies” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000, but also because she has gather an immense group of fans. And none of these facts are true by chance. This writer deserved them both.

“Interpreter of Maladies” is a collection of short stories – some already published, and some new. What is more impressive about this book is Lahiri’s command of the language. It can be stunning the way she can display simple words side by side to create a complex effect. This is an ability that many experience writers have never succeeded. But to make the experience more complex and delightful this writer is a chief storyteller. Her characters and plot are as complex and beautiful as her language.

Lahiri has a clinic eye for detail -or better for detailing the ordinary lives of ordinary people making them very unique. This is a device that she shares with Raymond Carver – who was also a master for this kind of short story. Analyzing the first text in the book, for example, “A Temporary Matter” and we see a couple, that used to love each other, but are falling out of love. The way the display their emotions and feelings couldn’t be more Carverinian. The surprise comes from the absolutely unexpected – that at the same time sounds plausible.

With a foot in the modern future and an eye in the traditional past, the writer gave her stories a global dimension. They are set in many different cities, like Boston, Orissa, Bengal, Cambridge. But she is able to portray all of them with accuracy and, above all, passion. There isn’t a single word that wasn’t crafted with a lot of passion and intelligence. In the end, this is the kind of book that also enriches one’s vocabulary – but using uncommon words doesn’t make Lahiri sounds pedantic. On the contrary, this is a device she applies to create the strangeness of the disconnected world where her characters inhabit.

These people aren’t eccentric or bizarre; they just are the way they are – and this is another major achievement. They are people trying to tie lose ties of their lives – may them (the ties) be with other people, with a new country or the old one. This way, the writer created a map of the disconnected human heart in search of something new (or even old) to link itself to.

With elegance, beauty and passion, Lahiri builds her stories – until the last one, that has a reason to be placed in the end of the book. By the end of this text, “The third and final continent” we understand where we had been through the previous stories. The last lines resonates everything we had read until them. And it can break and heal one’s heart.

Originalmente publicado em www.Amazon.com em 03/12/04