November 19, 2009: Page Turners 7 p.m.

Book: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Discussion:

We had a smaller group attend this month’s discussion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The majority of the group seemed to enjoy the book. Seven readers voted thumbs up, one voted thumbs down, and one voted sideways. Two group members who were unable to make it to the meeting sent in their votes by email. Interestingly, they also voted sideways.

It appears that short stories are not everyone’s cup of tea. More than one Page Turner commented that they are not really fans of the genre. One member said that she prefers a little more meat in the books she reads. Another said she was not necessarily a fan of short stories but that she enjoyed Lahiri’s book because of her wonderful prose and writing style. A few other Page Turners seconded her opinion.

After discussing the work as a whole we began talking about the individual stories. Many of the group members chose the final story The Third and Final Continent, as their favorite. In this story a young, recently married Indian man comes to the United States to take a job and prepare a home for his new wife. In doing so he develops a kind relationship with his landlady. Other stories that made an impact on us included Mrs. Sen’s, The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, A Temporary Matter, and This Blessed House.

In discussing the stories we inevitably began talking about food. Food is present in each of the stories in one form or another. In When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, an Indian American family invites another immigrant from the same part of India to share their evening meals, in A Temporary Matter a man working from home begins making dinner for his wife each night before their power is interrupted, in Mrs. Sen’s a boy watches his babysitter prepare traditional Indian food, particularly seafood, and in The Third and Final Continent a newly married man subsists on meals of cornflakes until his wife joins him in the United States.

We decided that this prevalence of food must serve as a connection for each of the characters to their Indian homeland. Aside from some of the female characters’ attire, Indian food is one of their final cultural ties to the world they grew up in. Thus, they are anxious to preserve it.

This idea of food as a kind of connection led me to think about connections in general. The book is obviously about the immigrant’s search for identity, but is also about the connections that are made between people. The stories in this book are full of these connections. Some of them occur between people from the same place such as the reconnection between the married couple in A Temporary Matter during nightly power outages. Others take place between immigrants and Americans as in Mrs. Sen’s when a young American boy grows to care about the Indian woman who watches him after school, or in the final story as the protagonist connects with his elderly landlady and shows a great deal of kindness by visiting her even after he moves out of her house. In the end, however, whether they take place between immigrants or natives, Interpreter of Maladies seems to be about human connections.

From this point on we meandered through a number of topics. We discussed Indian restaurants. One Page Turner recommended one near the South Garland Library. Another Page Turner mentioned an international market she visited in Richardson. Greg Mortenson’s organization had a booth there where you could donate to the building of his schools and teacher salaries in the Middle East. Readers will remember Mortenson from Three Cups of Tea, one of our previous selections.

We concluded the meeting by discussing the institution of arranged marriages. In the United States we often think of arranged marriages as outdated, but it seems that they are still quite common in other parts of the world. Several of the Page Turners related stories of people they knew whose marriages had been arranged. Some of them were quite successful while others were not, but the institution still remains in practice.

This discussion of marriage and some of the other themes allowed us to touch on our selection for next month, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Copies of that selection and flyers for upcoming programming were distributed at the meeting. Next month we will meet two weeks early, on December 10, to accommodate the holidays.