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anthofer 's review for:
Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
I was surprised by how bland this was. The title story reads almost exactly like a less blatantly misogynistic version "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," though since that may be the most vile short story ever written there's a lot of room to improve on its basic structure. Still, the cheating woman thing? IDK, still wasn't great.
The rest of the stories read as excessively Cambridge, as in Massachusetts, or England. Everyone is a little nutty in a way particular to the exported repression of the good ship Mayflower. There's a lot of talk about tenure or climbing up the chain at various engineering firms.
None of this is to deny that Lahari has style and grace. Her sentences are excellent. Her cadences are lyrical. The stories aren't fables (except for "A Blessed House," which is just kind of horrible bourgeois bullshit). I just have absolutely no idea what the fuss was about in 1999. Maybe it was a reaction against postmodernism, or even modernism, since as I said before these stories feel more like Hemingway than they do Rushdie or Naipaul.
The rest of the stories read as excessively Cambridge, as in Massachusetts, or England. Everyone is a little nutty in a way particular to the exported repression of the good ship Mayflower. There's a lot of talk about tenure or climbing up the chain at various engineering firms.
None of this is to deny that Lahari has style and grace. Her sentences are excellent. Her cadences are lyrical. The stories aren't fables (except for "A Blessed House," which is just kind of horrible bourgeois bullshit). I just have absolutely no idea what the fuss was about in 1999. Maybe it was a reaction against postmodernism, or even modernism, since as I said before these stories feel more like Hemingway than they do Rushdie or Naipaul.