“Maladies, poorly interpreted, can’t be cured.”
The seventh short story collection to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (when counting the previous collections of James Michener, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, Katherine Anne Porter, James Alan McPherson, and Robert Olen Butler), Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies contains nine short stories, many of which grapple wit hthe fragmented duality of the immigrant experience while offering autobiographical elements from Lahiri’s own life and upbringing, tiptoeing along the confluence of cultures between India and the United States. Each story features complex characters who are situated squarely in the midst of kaleidoscopic identities, whether from Calcutta, India or Cambridge, Massachusetts. These are people who are often unmoored in their lives, facing troubled marriages, academics without a place to belong, husbands and wives sitting with quiet moments of loneliness and alienation, ignorant foreign tourists, immigrants struggling to assimilate, and so on. These stories tend to be ambiguous in nature, often ending without resolution, avoiding cliché and rejecting simplistic gratification, while at the same time introducing readers to genuinely complicated forces at play within the hybrid tension within the immigrant experience. These stories often showcase people who straddle two very different worlds in the age of globalization.
In the first story “A Temporary Matter” (first published in The New Yorker in 1998) we meet an Indian-American couple, Shukumar and Shoba, who are trapped in a lifeless marriage after suffering the tragedy of a stillborn baby. But when the power goes out each night in their apartment, they are finally able to talk and share their unspoken secrets with one another in the darkness. Their confessions grow ever more heavy with each passing day and Shukumar starts to believe he is at last reconnecting with his wife again, until Shoba surprises him by announcing that their marriage is over and she is moving out. Hurt, he then tries to strike back at her by making one final confession, that he was given the brief chance to hold their deceased child and learn its gender before it was taken away (he says this because Shoba deliberately did not want to know if the baby was a boy or a girl). They both weep in the end, knowing that their marriage is over. “A Temporary Matter” is a deeply harrowing story, one of the best in the collection, and amazingly it was one of the first short stories Jhumpa Lahiri ever published, as well. The next story “When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine” (first published in the Louisville Review in the Fall 1996-Spring 1997 volume) takes place in 1971 during the thirteen day India-Pakistan War over the violent uprising in Bangladesh in then-East Pakistan. The story is told from the perspective of a young girl, Lilia, whose parents befriend fellow academic, Mr. Pirzada, whose own family has been tragically caught up in the swirling violence between Bengali Hindus and Pakistani Muslims in Dacca, Bangladesh. Lilia’s carefree American life is contrasted with the bloodshed and mass evacuations of children in Bangladesh as a result of the war. While Lilia participates in traditional American rites of passage, like trick-or-treating on Halloween or learning about George Washington in school, Mr. Pirzada worries about his wife and daughters back home. To bring a sense of innocence to the situation, he brings Lilia candies to her house each night and but in the end, it turns out that Mr. Pirzada’s has thankfully survived the war. A relieved Mr. Pirzada then flies back to India and reunites with them while Lilia realizes she will never see him again. She eventually tosses out her remaining candy, a symbol of her letting him go. “It was only then, raising my glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months” (41).
The titular story “Interpreter of Maladies” (first published in AGNI magazine in 1998) is one that I have continued to mull over long after reading. It follows the Das family, Indian-American tourists who travel with their children to India, Ronny, Bobby, and Tina. As they travel around the various sights, such as the ancient Sun Temple in Konarak, their tour guide, Mr. Kapasi, observes the arrogant, neglectful, spoiled behavior of the parents, Raj and Mina Das. At one point, he watches them stop to take pictures of a starving emaciated man on the side of the road. Raj and Mina are quintessential ugly American tourists in the truest sense, passing through India like visitors in a zoo, however there is an added complication in that they are of Indian descent, themselves. This adds a layer of complexity by challenging the predictable cliché of the ignorant white American tourist. But the trip takes a strange turn when Mr. Kapasi tells the Das family that he actually works during the week as an interpreter (or translator) in a medical office, a job that Mina quickly grows enamored with, she even calls it “romantic.” In response, Mr. Kapasi quietly grows attached to Mina. We learn about his troubled marriage at home and the ways in which he privately desires the attention of this strange American woman who finds his translating day job “romantic.” At one point, Mina even asks Mr. Kapasi for his home address so that she may write to him. However, as the day progresses, things change. The family ducks out for another excursion but Mina and Mr. Kapasi enjoy a moment alone together in the car. This is when Mina makes a startling confession. She tells Mr. Kapasi that she cheated on her husband and that one of their children, Bobby, was actually conceived by another man. And now she expects Mr. Kapasi to use his mystical powers as an “interpreter” to offer her consolation. Upon learning that Mr. Kapasi works as an “interpreter,” Minda now expects him to be her spiritual guide, to reach back into his deep well of Indian wisdom, waiting for words that will ultimately comfort her, making Mr. Kapasi just another part of the Das family’s orientalist experience in India. But rather than simply appeasing her wants, Mr. Kapasi seems disappointed in her and simply asks if what she really feels is pain or guilt for betraying her family. In response, she storms off and moments later they find her son Bobby being attacked by monkeys. Mr. Kapasi is forced to jump in and rescue the boy and as they walk away, Mr. Kapasi watches as the paper containing his address floats away. By the end of the story, the Das family’s tourism comes a little too close to an authentic experience (more of my thoughts on this story can be found below).
Next, “A Real Durwan” (first published in the Harvard Review) is set in a rural village in Calcutta where an odd woman who sweeps the stairs named Boori Ma is known for spinning lavish yarns, often filled with many contradictions and embellishments, about her past life before she was deported to Calcutta as a result of Partition which separated her from her husband and daughters. She looks back with nostalgia on her former life, claiming she once lived in a mansion with many servants and all sorts of delicacies at her fingertips. People living in the building doubt her stories, but her kookiness keeps away potential thieves since she is always in the stairwell sweeping. Thus, she serves as a “durwan” (or doorkeeper) for the building. One neighbor family, the Dalals, takes pity on Boori Ma and they begin taking care of her in addition to retrofitting the building. Other neighbors join in, but when Boori Ma is out one day spending her money, thieves quickly raid the building and Boori Ma is blamed. They doubt her story about spending her money since she has told many tall-tales over time. They kick her out of the building and decide to finally get a “real durwan.” This is one of a couple stories in the collection that take place entirely in India.
“Sexy” (first published in The New Yorker) is about a young lonely white woman named Miranda who has an affair with a married Indian man named Devajit “Dev” Mitra. At the same time, her co-worker Laxmi tells her about a cousin who is going through a divorce thanks to her cousin’s husband’s infidelity. As Miranda wrestles with her own status as a secret mistress, especially after Dev calls her “sexy” one afternoon, Miranda is suddenly called upon to babysit the very same son of her co-worker’s cousin. During the playdate, the boy (named Rohin) offhandedly mentions to Miranda that the word “sexy” means loving someone you don’t know after he watches her try on a dress she got specifically to impress Dev. This gives Miranda pause. It makes her wonder about her own affair and what it might do to Dev’s wife. Does Dev truly not know her? Does he love her? Like many of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, “Sexy” ends unresolved as Miranda begins subtly distancing herself from Dev, leading us to wonder if she will finally break things off with him. In “Mrs. Sen’s” (first published in Salamander literary magazine) eleven-year-old Eliot is sent by his mother to Mrs. Sen’s university apartment after school each day while his mother works (the character of Mrs. Sen is loosely based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s own mother). This is a tragic tale about an elderly immigrant woman who resists fully assimilating to American culture. Mrs. Sen is an old eccentric woman from India who misses her lifestyle back home, especially the fish she used to eat in Calcutta, but also the fact that back in India, she and her husband had a chauffeur who drove their car; in America, she is being forced to learn how to drive, herself. When Eliot goes to visit Mrs. Sen each day, she typically takes him on the bus to a local fish store, but at the end of the story, Mrs. Sen finally decides to try driving for herself. However, almost immediately after doing so, she winds up crashing her car into a telephone pole and this ends her time babysitting. From this point on, Eliot’s mother simply gives him a key to their beach house and asks him to contact a neighbor if he ever needs anything. The situation facing both Eliot and Mrs. Sen is very sad and isolating indeed.
In “This Blessed House” (first published in Epoch literary magazine) a newly married couple, Tanima “Twinkle” and Sanjeev (married by a matchmaker in India after knowing each other for a mere four months), move into their new rental home in Connecticut. Sanjeev is slightly cynical, a smoker who enjoys listening to Mahler’s symphonies, while Twinkle is more cheery and optimistic, someone people gravitate toward. Despite being “good little Hindus” as they dig around their new house, they start finding Christian statues and iconography littered all over the place. Sanjeev despises these anti-Hindu signs of Christianity but Twinkle embraces them, tenderly gathering them on the mantle. She is amused by all the crucifixes and believing they will bring her good luck (perhaps making their new house a “blessed house”). In this story, the clash of cultures exposes a rift in the marriage of Sanjeev and Twinkle as they host a much-anticipated housewarming party for all of Sanjeev’s co-workers. At the party, Twinkle enthusiastically explains to the guests about all the Christian symbolism. She directs all the guests around the house on a treasure hunt, eventually leading them into the attic where they find a large silver bust of Jesus Christ. As they lift the silver bust down from the attic, Sanjeev ponders his feelings of alienation, sensing a deprivation in both his culture and his marriage, and the story ends on an ambiguous, ponderous note as he watches his wife become the life of the party.
“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” (first published in Story Quarterly) is a sad fable-esque story about a 29-year-old epileptic woman in India named Bibi Haldar who longs to be married and have a child, but she is sadly unwanted and ostracized by all the men in the village (even after posting an advertisement for herself). She lives alone in the building above her cousin’s cosmetics shop and she works by taking inventory of the cosmetic products. Eventually, however, her cousin is driven out of business, and he packs up his family and moves away. He leaves Bibi behind with only a thin envelope of cash. Bibi then retreats into isolation, goes silent, and the community steps in to provide her with food. But people are later shocked to discover that she is four months pregnant. In time, she delivers her child and runs a business herself, but nobody ever learns the name of the man who had disgraced her and Bibi can no longer remember either, but having a child apparently has cured her of her sudden seizures.
In the final story “The Third and Final Continent” (initially published in The New Yorker) is about a narrator who works in the processing department of the Dewey Library at MIT, not unlike Jhumpa Lahiri’s own father who worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island. The narrator is married to a woman who has remained back in India and he boards in a room owned by a quirky elderly woman named Mrs. Croft who is apparently 103-years-old. In time, the narrator grows deeply attached to Mrs. Croft, after all she is a widow just like his mother who once descended into depression and insanity after her own widowhood. But eventually, the man’s wife, Mala, joins him in America and they decide to move into a new house together. From here, the man starts to feel distant from his wife and he discovers that Mrs. Croft has died. He is sad for a time but then ultimately grows closer to his wife and falls in love with her again. They have a son who grows up and attends Harvard University. The narrator enjoys taking his son and his wife to the old building where he once lived with Mrs. Croft and he is reminded of his own strength and all that he overcame in moving to the United States to make his fortune. “The Third and Final Continent” is a beautiful, bittersweet story that lovingly rounds out this collection.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a sharply observed, deeply introspective collection of short stories filled with compellingly simple prose, but ultimately it is her richly imagined characters that grip the reader the most –these are men and women who are questioning their romantic relationships, lonely people looking for friendship, strangers wandering through a strange land, people feeling out of place, immigrants dealing with dislocation and diaspora, newcomers struggling to assimilate to the dominant culture, people feeling distant from their families, nostalgic for their childhood, longing for their homeland, all while also simultaneously sensing the pull of the new world.
The stories that stand out to me most in Interpreter of Maladies are “A Temporary Matter,” “When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine,” “Interpreter of Maladies,” “Mrs. Sen’s,” “This Blessed House” and “The Third and Final Continent” because these stories strike closely at the focal point of what it means to have a modern fragmented and uprooted identity, particularly for Indian immigrants in America. But it is the titular story “Interpreter of Maladies” that continues to leave me in a state of wonder. There is something deeply troubling to me about a family of ignorant tourists traveling to India in search of pleasant, simplistic, feel-good eastern spiritual gratification. It made me think about the idea of tourism, in general. In what ways do we see ourselves, as readers, in this very idea of tourism? Is it right to compare or contrast ourselves with the unpleasant portrayal of the Das family? And likewise to what extent should we compare a writer like Jhumpa Lahiri to the Indian tour guide, Mr. Kapasi? As Domenico Starnone poses in his introductory remarks for the book: “For what is a writer if not an interpreter of maladies?” Perhaps there is an unspoken cultural expectation that we, as idle readers, will approach a writer like Jhumpa Lahiri with the biased expectation that she will serve us as a representative of India; that she will present herself a proponent of globalized Indian American literature; that she will gratify us literary tourists with a string of cozy “feel-good” stories that will unleash a font of deep ancient spiritual wisdom a la Eat, Pray, Love and the exotic allure of the “Oriental” East. But Mr. Kapasi is hardly a magical medicine man. He is merely an ordinary tour guide, stuck in a loveless marriage, who once had dreams of becoming a diplomatic translator. In other words he defies stereotype or caricature. He is relatable, sympathetic, and complex. And perhaps this is an insight that can help us readers shed the weight of our narrow expectations and shake us out of our complacent “tourist” attitude, whether we are being guided around India by Mr. Kapasi or guided through a short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Indeed, again and again in Interpreter of Maladies we are tasked with deconstructing narrow stereotypes of India and Indians as a monoculture (and likewise for America and Americans). Rather than simply catering to our lazier impulses, the stories in Interpreter of Maladies force us to sit with uncomfortability, as we experience scenes of a dissolving marriage after a stillborn child, a rental house occupied by a Hindu couple that is filled with Christian iconography, or a family of self-serving tourists who are filled with the desire for inauthenticity. Throughout these stories, we are asked to sit with uncomfortable, inconclusive feelings. This uncomfortability and ambiguity is what makes Interpreter of Maladies so seizing and yet so sorrowful. After reading these stories, the reader is left subsumed in a hallowed state of somberness.
Notable Quotations:
For this section, I decided to include the opening line of each short story. Otherwise, I might have to add several hundred other quotations from these nine stories.
“The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.” (opening line of the first story “A Temporary Matter”).
“In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family” (23, opening line of “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”).
“At the tea stall Mr. and Mrs. Das bickered about who should take Tina to the toilet” (43, opening line of “Interpreter of Maladies”).
“Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell, had not slept in two nights” (69, opening line of “A Real Durwan”).
“It was a wife’s worst nightmare. After nine years of marriage, Laxmi told Miranda, her cousin’s husband had fallen in love with another woman” (82, opening line of “Sexy”).
“Eliot had been going to Mrs. Sen’s for nearly a month, ever since school started in September” (109, opening line of “Mrs. Sen’s”).
“They discovered the first one in a cupboard above the stove, beside an unopened bottle of malt vinegar” (133, opening line of “This Blessed House”).
“For the greater number of her twenty-nine years, Bibi Haldar suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, gem therapists, prophets, and fools” (154, opening line from “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”).
“I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name” (169, opening line of “The Third and Final Continent”).
The 2000 Pulitzer Prize Decision:
The 2000 Pulitzer Fiction jury consisted of the following three members, one of whom previously served as a fiction jury chair (Joel Conarroe):
- Chair: Rebecca “Becky” Pepper Sinkler (1936-present) has been a lifelong Philadelphian and celebrated book reviewer. She was the former editor of the The New York Times Book Review in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. As of the time of this writing, she is retired.
- Joel Conarroe (1934-2024) was an American arts administrator and professor. He was the head of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1983 to 2003 (the third president of the organization). He was also a trusted personal confidant to countless writers, most notably Philip Roth. He previously served as executive director of the Modern Language Association and president of the P.E.N. American Center. He served as a chairman of the National Book Award fiction jury and also the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury and other similar roles. He published analyses of the poetry of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman and edited multiple poetry anthologies, including “Six American Poets,” a widely circulated 1993 survey of works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and others. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1956, a master’s degree in English from Cornell University the following year, and a doctorate in English from New York University in 1966. A gay man, he developed a long-term relationship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici. He died at age 89 in 2024 due to advanced melanoma.
- Wendy Lesser (1952-present) is an American critic, writer, and editor based in Berkeley, California. She received a BA from Harvard University, a BPhil from King’s College, Cambridge, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. She is the founding editor of an arts journal entitled The Threepenny Review. She is the author of a novel entitled The Pagoda in the Garden (2005) and several works of nonfiction, including Why I Read (2014) as well as a biography of architect Louis Kahn for which she won the Marfield Prize in 2017. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.
The jury report submitted to the Board contained three pages, each a lengthy review of each finalist: Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and Waiting by Ha Jin. Uniquely this year, each full-page review contained the names of all three jurors and the pages were each signed by chair Rebecca Sinkler.
I won’t copy the full-page commentary on Interpreter of Maladies by the jury, but some of their praise included: “Wisdom – a delicate mixture of the aesthetic and moral varieties – is the keynote of ‘Interpreter of Maladies,’ Jhumpa Lahiri’s marvelous book of short stories,” and “Every story pulls at the heart in a different way, but never sentimentally, never cheaply,” and “Each story in the volume is memorable, and the best – ‘A Temporary Matter,’ ‘Interpreter of Maladies,’ and particularly ‘The Third and Final Continent’ – will long be cherished by readers and writers of the short story.”
After the report was presented to the Board by the Pulitzer Prize Administrator (as is done each year) I am unsure of how the Board came to select Interpreter of Maladies over Close Range: Wyoming Stories and Waiting since the Pulitzer Prize decisions are notoriously secretive. Perhaps it’s safe to assume that the Pulitzer Board thought Annie Proulx had already been sufficiently recognized thanks to her Pulitzer victory with The Shipping News a few years earlier in 1994, and maybe there was something more compelling about Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories exploring the Indian-American experience over and against Ha Jin’s novel exploring the Chinese-American experience (Waiting won the National Book Award a few months prior, maybe this award swayed the Pulitzer Board toward Interpreter of Maladies instead). We may only speculate.
Note: for those interested, the Pulitzer Prize website features a photograph from the 2000 award ceremony of then-Columbia University President George Rupp presenting Jhumpa Lahiri with the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lahiri later said her Pulitzer Prize win meant a lot more to her parents than it ever did to her.
As a secondary note, I have seen quite a bit of erroneous information online about Jhumpa Lahiri being the youngest person to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But this is false. Jhumpa Lahiri was about 32 years old at the time she won the Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies, but as of the time of this writing, Josephine Johnson is still the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she was a mere 24-years-old when she won in 1935 for her novel Now in November. Separately, the youngest Pulitzer Prize-winner in any category to win was apparently 22-year-old photojournalist Stephanie Welsh.
Interpreter of Maladies was the first true paperback book to win the Pulitzer Prize, meaning it was initially published in paperback form, not hardcover (later this also became the case with the 2022 winner, The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen). All other winners to date have been initially released in hardcover form (as far as I am aware).
Who is Jhumpa Lahiri?
Nilanjana Sudeshna “Jhumpa” Lahiri (1967-present) was born in London, the daughter of Bengali Hindu immigrants from West Bengal. She learned to speak Bengali at a young age. The family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts when Jhumpa Lahiri was three years old, and later relocated to Kingston, Rhode Island. Her pet name “Jhumpa” technically has no real meaning, but it is similar to “jhuma,” which refers to the sound of a child’s rattle (but with a ”p” sound added). Lahiri told The New York Times in 2003 that the name acutally upsets her. Her father worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island and her mother was a schoolteacher who wanted her children to grow up in the tradition of their Bengali heritage. She often brought her two daughters back to visit relatives in Calcutta.
In her youth, Jhumpa Lahiri enjoyed writing stories in notebooks and performing in school plays. She received her BA in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. This was followed by an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, an MA in Comparative Literature, and a PhD in Renaissance Studies, all from Boston University. Her dissertation, which was completed in 1997, was entitled “Accursed Palace: The Italian Palazzo on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625).” It was an analysis of the Italian palazzo as setting and metaphor in English Jacobean drama. While completing her many degrees, Lahiri worked various jobs, such as at a bookstore and as a research assistant. She had a two-year fellowship at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, she has since taught creative writing at Boston University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Princeton University in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and in 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater Barnard College.
Lahiri’s early short stories faced rejection from publishers, but she got her big break with the publication of the story “Interpreter of Maladies,” which was published in the American literary magazine AGNI at Boston University in 1998. It received positive reviews, winning an O. Henry Award and a PEN/Hemingway Award, and was included in The Best American Short Stories of 1999 by editors Katrina Kenison and Amy Tan. Lahiri’s debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies was released the following year in 1999 to widespread acclaim, ultimately winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
As of the time I am writing this, Lahiri has published three novels and three short story collections. Her first novel, The Namesake, was published in 2003 (it was later adapted into a film in 2007). Lahiri’s second short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was released on April 1, 2008, debuting as a #1 New York Times bestseller (in 2025, a Netflix series adaptation was announced as being in development). She has received numerous awards and honors throughout her literary career. In 2010, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. In 2013, her novel The Lowland was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. In 2016, she received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a literary critic and contributor to The New Yorker for over twenty-five years. She has received honorary degrees from The University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, and the University of Rhode Island, along with honorary degrees in Italy, from the University for Siena per Stranieri and the University of Bologna.
In December 2015, Lahiri published a non-fiction essay called “Teach Yourself Italian” in The New Yorker. It was about her experience learning Italian. In it, she announced that she would primarily be publishing her future work in Italian. In 2012, she moved to Rome with her family where she experienced full immersion and stopped speaking in English. She has described this experience speaking Italian as an opportunity to feel more free and authentic. She has said living in Italy was at least partly a chance for her to escape her own literary celebrity in the United States. She also told The Wall Street Journal in October 2023 that living in Italy allowed her to be in close proximity to the ruins of antiquity, a reminder that we all are merely “passing through.” Additionally, for those who are interested, there is a terrific interview Lahiri gave to The Paris Review in 2024.
In recent years, Lahiri has taken a public stance protesting the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, as well as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region.
In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a Greek-Guatemalan American journalist who served as the deputy editor of TIME Latin America, Time magazine’s Spanish-language supplement for Latin America which he helped launch. He has also been managing editor of Fox News Latino, El Diario/La Prensa (New York’s largest Spanish-language daily newspaper), and he was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome when the family moved to Rome in 2012. Lahiri and Vourvoulias-Bush have two children: Octavio (born 2002) and Noor (born 2005). From what I can tell, they divide their time between Brooklyn and Rome.
Film Adaptations:
- None.
- A feature film was scheduled to be made according to an article The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, with director Amitav Kaul set to produce the film under the company IOM Films. However, the project apparently stalled in a financial dispute between investors and the director amidst allegations of millions of dollars being stolen overseas.
Further Reading:
- The Namesake (2003), a novel
- Unaccustomed Earth (2008), a short story collection
- The Lowland (2013), a novel
- Racconti romani (2022), or “Roman Stories” (2023), a short story collection
Literary Context 1999-2000
- 1999 Nobel Prize Winner: awarded to German writer Günter Grass (1927–2015) “whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history.”
- 1999 National Book Award Winner: Waiting by Ha Jin
- 1999 Booker Prize Winner: Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
- According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1999 was The Testament by John Grisham (Grisham was the #1 bestseller each year between 1994-1999). Other notable bestsellers in 1999 included Hannibal by Thomas Harris, Assassins by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye (another installment in the Christian apocalyptic fictional “Left Behind” series), Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks, Timeline by Michael Crichton, Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King, and others.
- J. K. Rowling published the third Harry Potter novel: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
- The first book in the “Series of Unfortunate Events” series The Bad Beginning (1999) was published by Lemony Snicket (the pseudonym of Daniel Handler).
- Isabel Allende published Daughter of Fortune.
- Laurie Halse Anderson published the young adult novel Speak.
- Stephen Chbosky published The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
- Louis Sachar published Holes.
- J. M. Coetzee published Disgrace.
- Nicholas Sparks published A Walk to Remember.
- Maeve Binchy published Tara Road.
- Joanne Harris published Chocolat.
- True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway was posthumously published.
- John le Carré published Single & Single.
- Frank McCourt published ‘Tis.
- Susan Sontag published In America.
- Neal Stephenson published Cryptonomicon.
- Chuck Palahniuk published two novels: Invisible Monsters and Survivor.
- Terry Pratchett published The Fifth Elephant.
- Aaron Allston published two more Star Wars novels: Solo Command and Starfighters of Adumar.
- K. W. Jeter published the Star Wars novel Hard Merchandise.
- R. A. Salvatore published the Star Wars novel Vector Prime.
- Michael Stackpole published the Star Wars novel Isard’s Revenge.
- Raymond Benson published two more James Bond novels: High Time to Kill and The World Is Not Enough.
- Ben Bova published Return to Mars.
Did the Right Book Win?
Interpreter of Maladies is a wonderful collection of short stories. Many of these stories explore profound ambiguities and myriad complexities within the human experience, especially in the age of globalization. Throughout the collection, there is a woven subtext that questions the idea of home and belonging, challenging the myth of monoculture, much of it mirroring Jhumpa Lahiri’s own struggle for her personal self-definition as a blend of Indian, British, American, and now Italian.
As I mentioned above, it seems to me we should resist the temptation to pigeonhole Jhumpa Lahiri into a narrow box as merely an “Indian American author” who is simply an ethnographer of the “Indian American experience.” Does Interpreter of Maladies investigate and interrogate the Indian American experience? Sure. But in my view Lahiri has greater depth and complexity to her writing beyond being rendered a “representative” of India or the Indian American experience. This seems a shade too limiting and caricaturizing for a collection of short stories that acutely confronts broader human themes of alienation, loneliness, displacement, and uprootedness.
Interpreter of Maladies is perhaps an even more important book today than it was upon initial release in 1999. One wonders if it would still generate the same cultural buzz today if it had been released in our present moment of reaction, anti-globalization, and demagogic nativism on the rise.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. New York, New York, 2019 (originally published in 1999). Lahiri dedicated the book to her parents and sister.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.
Thank you for this. I see a lot of books on this list that have begged me to read them.