Did not like the book. It’s a draaaaaaggg. The author bombards you with a plethora of descriptions, often unnecessary and in the most mundane manner possible. A cop recording a crime scene makes more poetic observations than this. The stories are hollow and monotonous- they run flat like the line on a heart monitor attached to a corpse. What’s most agonising is that the patience doesn’t pay off as there is no climax. You can hunt for one with a ghost detector radar, but it doesn’t exist.
A few stories, like ‘Sexy’ and ‘Mrs Sen’s’, are exceptionally bad. Like really wonderfully bad. The main story- ‘Interpreter of Maladies’- has such a poor flowering that you wish it was nipped in the bud.
Maybe it’s because I have not read many short stories. I have read a few by Roald Dahl and I liked them. I have tried Tolstoy- not my cup of tea. Lahiri has confessed she likes Tolstoy. So my dislike makes sense to me.
Another reason could be that I cannot relate to the diaspora literature- the experience of a Bengali immigrant in America, and there’s nothing to make it engrossing either.
Maybe other non-Pulitzer books by her are better. Maybe my views will change a decade later.
For now, this one can’t make it to Mumbai (IYKWIM).
roastedmoongfalis 