Book Review: The Interpreter of Maladies

Some books pop out and grab the reader all at once. Others take longer and then sneak up on you. This is one of the those.

I read it a year or so ago not expecting much from a woman's book of short stories about India and Indians. But it had been a gift to my wife from her mother. She brought it back from New York to our jungle outpost in Mexico, where books in English can be rare. So I tried it. Tentatively at first and slowly. Its' pace and its surprises made themselves felt.

It is definitely not a jump-in-your-face collection. It is a group of slice of life stories and characterizations of both Indians in India and Indians in America. The stories take place in that traditional culture and in New England. There is a clash of culures. These are people who both are and are not comfortable in their place or culture and are feeling their way through life with doubts and fears.

Each story of a place and person flows along with the pace of life and then ends quietly. Only later does the epiphany (when they are successful) strike. Suddenly a piece of the puzzle of what life is like for all of us and for these people lost in and between cultures becomes more real and more illuminated. This is the moment of pleasure which short stories aim to give and often don't.

The writer, herself of Indian descent but born in London, raised in Rhode Island is living in New York City. We feel her most in those stories like "Sexy" where the protagonist is someone more American than Indian who is confronted with the specter of the India of her ancestors, the alien nature of its' gods and foods and thinking.

Note my reference to food. These stories abound with the tastes and textures of Indian cookery They are the nature of the culture itself . Miranda, the "other woman" who narrates "Sexy" stops in an Indian grocery in Central Square, Boston.

"Can I help you?" the man standing at the cash register asked. He was eating a samosa, dipping it into some dark brown sauce on a paper plate. Below the glass counter at his waist were trays of more plump samosas, and what looked like pale, diamond-shaped pieces of fudge covered with foil, and some bright orange pastries floating in syrup.

Miranda is having an affair with a man who knows his Indian culture and, suddenly she wants to know something about it, too.

Apart from Laxmi and Dev, the only Indians whom Miranda had known were a family in the neighborhood where she' grown up... One year, all the neighborhood children were invited to the birthday party of the Dixit girl. Miranda remembered a heavy aroma of incense and onions in the house, and a pile of shoes heaped by the front door. But most of all she remembered a piece of fabric, about the size of a pillowcase, which hung from a wooden dowel at the bottom of the stairs. It was a painting of a naked woman with a red face shaped like a knight's shield. She had enormous white eyes that tilted toward her temples, and mere dots for pupils. Two circles, with the same dots at their centers, indicated her breasts. In one hand she brandished a dagger. With one foot she crushed a struggling man on the ground... She stuck her tongue out at Miranda...

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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