"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Thursday, May 02, 2019

Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999)

(198 pages)

A collection of nine short stories.  Most concern the experiences of Indians who have emigrated to America; a couple stories are set in India.

I liked it.  Of course we now know several folks from India who are living in the U.S.  I don't know that the stories have any overlap whatsoever with the experiences of folks we know, but in general it's useful to get this perspective.  While the comparison is rather strained (because so much more of the heritage was in common), the book even made me think a bit about 19th-century Luxembourg emigrants to the U.S.

I think my favorite story was the last one - about the Bengali gentleman who took a job in the Boston area, rented a room with a (very) elderly lady, brought over an arranged-marriage wife, and settled in the Northeast U.S.
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