I first read Jhumpa Lahiri in the New Yorker. 'A Temporary Matter' was about a married couple in Boston who had grown apart after a miscarriage. It was subtle and nuanced, the Indian backgrounds were present but not overwhelming, and I was quite taken. Both this story and her other New Yorker story, Sexy, appear in this collection.

The stories don't have grand passions and tumultous relationships, or dramatic plots. Instead, they exquisitely detail the thoughts of one individual about a period of his or her life. For example, a woman who is having an affair with a married man and watches him go back to his wife each week. Or a child who goes to an immigrant woman's home each day after school, and sees her deal with homesickness, loneliness and isolation.

Note that I said 'his or her life'. Unlike many (most?) authors, she writes in the voices of both genders. In one story, a young man reacts with faint disgust and dislike to his new wife's unsuspected fascination with kitsch Christian artifacts. I have no idea whether the male voice is realistic or not, obviously, but to me it rang true. I could also easily imagine the genders of the characters reversed, or that they were a gay couple, so that it was more a story about two _people_ than this particular couple.

The common theme is an inability to communicate. This happens for many reasons -- the dynamics of a relationship, cultural differences, immigration and adjustment...and sometimes these disjointed interactions change during the course of the story.

The title story, Interpreter of Maladies, was one of my favourites, partly because of its name. It's a job title; a man who translates patient complaints to a doctor who does not speak the language. His other job is as a tour guide, and in this particular story he is driving an NRI couple and their three young children around. I was struck by Lahiri's ability to get into the skin of her characters -- the interpreter describes the NRI woman's shirt as 'designed like a man's undershirt'. How could someone who grew up in the US see that the tank top is like a standard Indian banian, and not the other way around?

My other favourite was 'The Third and Final Continent', again in a male voice. A young man comes to the US, has an arranged marriage in India, and writes about his new wife and their life together. Loaded words, 'arranged marriage', but I found this story very touching and not at all exoticized or simplified. I loved the first shared moment of familiarity and amusement, a few weeks after his wife first arrived in Boston.

India is present in some way in each story, but in most it is a minor fact, not a focus of the story. For example, the young woman's married lover is Indian, and that colours her interactions with her Indian co-worker. The Boston couple is Indian, but their ethnicity is mostly irrelevant to the story. A couple of the stories are set in India, and again I was impressed by how comfortable she was writing about Indians in India. The realities of India affect the lives of the characters, but in the end they are just people.

A friend thought the story 'Sexy', was very sad, and that's true of almost all the stories in the book. They're not depressing exactly, but I had to take a deep breath after each story to snap out of the mood. Not that I want to discourage anyone from reading them; in case this isn't obvious, I thought they were remarkable stories. She is a startlingly perceptive writer, and amazingly young to be so knowledgeable about sadness. Her bio says she's about 30, but the many delicate shades of sorrow in her stories read like she should be quite a bit older.

Jhumpa Lahiri is sensational because of her manner which is anything but sensationalist in describing the psyche of Bengalis who have settled into North American cultures. Unlike the propensity of recent purveyors of "ethnic exotica," and I mean writers like Bharati Mukherjee or Chitra Divakaruni, to aspire to florid excess in describing acculturation's aches and pains, Lahiri writes with a depth and honesty which require no melodrama.

Perhaps because I share her background in many ways, I am particularly mesmerized at finding for the first time in her *Interpreter of Maladies* glimpses and snatches of a world intimately familiar to me. I cannot praise Lahiri enough.

Two stories which struck home were "Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dinner" and "Mrs. Sen's." The first describes the growing awareness of a 10 year old girl growing up in a Boston suburb of her Indianness, when her Indian Bengali parents befriend a visiting Bangladeshi botanist, whose stay in the U.S. coincides with the Bangladeshi war of independence in 1971. The scenes revolving around the preparation of dinner, which was to be eaten while watching the evening news (what a relic of the pre-CNN age!), with mother at the stove, father snacking on cashews as he leans against the fridge, and a young girl interacting with them both were evocative of Indian American life in a way that only one who has lived that life would perceive.

"Mrs. Sen's," the story of a young woman trying to adapt to the lonely life of a housewife married to an untenured and anxious math professor, who tries to expand her horizons by babysitting a neglected, young white boy in her apartment afterschool, brought back my memories of many women of my mother's generation. Their sincerity and anguish in coming to grips with the postscript of marriage to a stranger then moving to a strange new culture were captured precisely by Lahiri's sensitive portrayal of the title character. I particularly enjoyed (and cried over) the subplot of Mrs. Sen's determination to find fresh, whole fish.

Lahiri is the first writer of Indian American experiences who has struck a chord within me. Read this book!

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