It means loving someone you don't know.

Completed January 4th, 2015

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This collection of stories explores interactions between India and North America through multiple angles: Indian immigrants with American landlords, American children with Indian babysitters, Indian-American families as tourists in their parents' birthplace. Although it focuses on, and elegantly captures, the heritage of India, it touches on experiences that are universal to anyone who has found themselves trying to understand and survive in a new place.

From the first page of this book, I was struck by how Lahiri reveals the inner lives of her characters by describing their outward actions, appearances, and environments with just the perfect amount of detail - enough to bring them to life in the reader's imagination, but never so much as to encumber the storytelling. All the stories share a sense of nostalgia and bittersweetness, but each story also shows a different facet of how these emotions impact people's lives. Some characters are driven towards resignation and others towards perseverance, each in a subtly different way.

If I were to find a flaw in the book, it would be that a few of the stories wound up being a little too sentimental and predictable. But, the predictability of the plot wasn't too big a problem - I was drawn in and kept reading because I was fascinated by the mosaic formed by people's memories and desires.

Once or twice while reading this book, I inexplicably found tears in my eyes - not necessarily due to any particularly sad event in the story, but because these characters and their quiet, everyday trials felt so concrete and real, and because I can see these experiences mirrored in people in my own life.

[Read for the Read Harder Challenge: a collection of short stories]

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