Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Just a quickie review as we're on the slopes in Vermont (again!..see pic above..) but this wonderful book has changed my previous aversion to short stories. Lahiri won the Pulitzer for this collection (her FIRST book) of tales of various Indian folks, young and old, male and female, living in the US and abroad, told from various viewpoints. I'm cheating here because I've got to go skating with Annie :).. so here's a brief part of the NYT review in 1999:

In this accomplished collection of stories, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the lives of people on two continents -- North America and India -- and in doing so announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice. Indeed, Ms. Lahiri's prose is so eloquent and assured that the reader easily forgets that ''Interpreter of Maladies'' is a young writer's first book.

Many of Ms. Lahiri's people are Indian immigrants trying to adjust to a new life in the United States, and their cultural displacement is a kind of index of a more existential sense of dislocation. One couple living near a small New England campus ''used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world'' in search of new friends. Another faculty wife, who has taken a baby-sitting job to fill her empty afternoons, tells her young charge that everything she cares about remains in India in the home she left behind. ''Here, in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me,'' she complains, ''I cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence.''

What Mrs. Sen misses in America is the close sense of community she knew in India. ''Not everybody has a telephone,'' she explains. ''But just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements.'' In America, she worries, she could scream at the top of her lungs and not a single person would come to her aid.

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time...