By Ron Breines
Special to the Daily Yomiuri
Aug. 13, 2000
INTERPRETER
OF MALADIES
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Houghton Mifflin, 198 pp. 23 dollars
Shukumar and Shoba are a couple from India now living in a small Boston neighborhood. Shukumar is trying to complete his dissertation on agrarian revolts in India, while Shoba plays the dutiful Indian wife and stays at home. They have been married for many years, the result of an arrangement by their parents back in India. For a long time now, neither has felt much passion for anything, except the past, as they constantly think back to when times were different.
Suddenly, they receive a notice from the city saying that the area will experience an electrical blackout for exactly one hour every evening for one week for repairs. What at first seems to be a nuisance proves to be a period of renewal for the couple, however temporary.
Every evening, in preparation for the event, Shoba sets up candles so that when Shukumar returns home, they can eat by candlelight. In the proceeding evenings, they find that they are at bliss within the moment, free from such distractions as radio and television. They find themselves talking to each other in ways they had not done in years. Shoba wants to tell Shukumar something important, decisive, but she is caught up in the stories and remembrances, and maybe even a glint of recovered passion.
But all events do come to an end, as does this one, when Shoba and Shukumar are bounced back to normality and must confront the news Shoba eventually tells her husband. It was just "A Temporary Matter," the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri' s first collection of stories, the collection that won, to the surprise of many, the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It is an amazing happening; an author wins the Pulitzer Prize with her first publication (all of these stories had been published by magazines before, but not in one complete collection). But this is by no means the work of a novice. It is the work of a writer who has honed her craft internally for years in order to compile a body of work so mature, eloquent, literary, substantial and outright beautiful that a reader, without knowing any better, would have to think Lahiri had just written her ninth symphony.
Such is the elegant way in which these wonderfully revealing stories of India are brought to life. There is a certain unpredictable quality to the tales, all filled with as much humor as they are with despair and longing. If there is a link between them, it is one of human fulfillment that encompasses all the emotions of the human endeavor, describing in picturesque detail the fragility of life. Lahiri is nothing less than a sage when it comes to her psychological insights, and this is why her collection is like no other. It is as fresh as anything written in decades.
The book moves back and forth from America to India on the backs of characters unique to the culture of continental India. Whether she is talking about a woman who has been transplanted from her native land to America, or about a tour guide who is showing expatriates their old country, Lahiri is fluently descriptive, completely able to bring the reader to her place. All the stories revolve around a longing for what might be, but with characters following paths they have not always chosen for themselves.
"My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood."
This excerpt comes from the book's last story, "The Third and Final Continent," which is also the bookend to "A Temporary Matter," two stories about marriage and tradition, the gradual growth of love and its eventual dissipation. Between these two stories are lessons about the lives of couples and the effect they have on those around them. They are about the differences and similarities of distant cultures and about what one gives up in order to receive something else.
It is no stretch to say that Jhumpa Lahiri's fresh, new talent will help us recover from the relative decline of literature as pure art. What will be next from this prodigious talent one can only imagine. But what is here now is something to cherish.
Copyright 2000 Yomiuri Shimbun