Review 728: Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a collection of nine short stories. I found it mixed, a few I really enjoyed, while others not so much.

The characters in these stories are in the United States from India or Bangladesh. The stories explore the cultural aspects of the people while living in a different type of society. There is the juxtaposition of the way things are done in America to how these characters were raised.
I enjoyed the last story, The Third and Final Continent. A young man needs temporary lodging while he waits for his new wife to come to American and join him. He finds a room with an elderly woman, and he is very surprised when he finds out she is over 100 years old.

In the second story, When Mr. Pirzada came to Dine, is narrated by a child. Mr. Pirzada is now from Pakistan as the story takes place during the time of India being ripped apart. The family should now dislike and separate themselves from him as their home countries, but of course they do not. I thought this was one of the better stories as well.

Review 462: The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3.25 of 5 stars

A long generational saga from India that begins during the colonial rule through the painful split into the 1990s. The Zogoiby family are wealthy Christian spice merchants. And there’s a lot of family drama. Everyone is a bit crazy. The narrator is called Moor, born as the last child eight years after his three sisters, who were born in quick succession. His mother Aurora is indeed a bright star, a famous painter who married at age 15 to a man her father’s age, and Abraham happened to be Jewish. Of course that was a problem. He takes over the family business and turns it into an empire.

The book is well written, sometimes humorous, and very witty. I did not like the book. I wanted to quit reading nearly the entire time. But it’s Rushdie and I never have read a book of his, and this one I’ve had sitting on my shelf for way too many years. So I pushed myself to read it through. I guess I’m happy to have finished, to have not wondered how the book ends, but as the rest of it, a bit ridiculous and odd.

There are many who have tagged this book as magical realism and it is a type of book that I typically don’t enjoy, but the “magical” aspect found here is not heavily handed. Some of the characters see things that aren’t there, but then just about everyone is a little bit crazy too, so it does match their character.

I’m not going to rush out and read another Rushdie book anytime soon.

Review 422: Small Days and Nights

Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book, but the main character, Grace, I could not connect with. Grace claimed it was hard to grasp her history and that's how the whole book felt, particularly about the main character. Grace is in her 30s, her marriage is failing in America, when her mother dies in India. Grace herself is half-Italian, half-Indian. Upon her mother's death Grace finds out she has a sister that has Down's Syndrome and has been raised in a care home.

Grace inherits not only a fairly large sum of money to live without working, but also a house along the beach near a small village. Here Grace brings her sister to live and care for her. But the monotony of the daily activities and the remoteness is too much so about once a month she goes into the city to visit friends for the weekend.

The book attempts to be about her parents, and her marriage but it seems to fall flat so often.

Review 400: Transplanted Man

Transplanted Man by Sanjay Nigam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is centered around a hospital in New York’s “Little India” with the doctors, patients, and other workers as the characters. There are several themes in this book, primarily seems to be about sleep disturbances and relationship problems, but that is not all. Yet there is a lot of humor in the book as well, perhaps as taking life to an extreme, such as one of the first couples in the E.R. we meet is where the man took a severe bite on his wife’s buttocks. This bite, of course, does lead to problems in the marriage.

Sonny is a resident doctor, who sleepwalks, and has a healing touch. One of the main patients is a politician from India with so many transplanted organs he is known as the Transplant Man. Thus, we get the title of the book, but it is a double meaning, as most of the people are transplants from India.

We follow Sonny with a relationship with an English Indophile nurse, Gwen, who loves literature but found her calling with helping people instead. She has her own unknown illness which caused relationship issues before.

There are many characters in the book, seemingly follow them all, but it doesn’t become confusing as they are distinct enough and introduced slowly. The book doesn’t seem to have much of a plot itself, we just follow these characters and see what happens, much like a year in the life of type story. Everyone does have some transformations of sorts, so it is not static in any way. An entertaining book.

Brief Review 352: Queen of Dreams

Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Glad I stuck with the book. I almost stopped reading several times, really disliked the main character. But around the half-way point something dramatic happened, then later "9/11" happened, and the main character changed. This is one of those books where there is definite growth of a person.