With her experiences of three cultures - born in London of Bengali
parents, and brought up on the east coast of America - Lahiri has
been blessed with a selection of many narrative colours on her
fictional palette. She uses them with a sure hand in this
collection of nine poignant but simple stories. Mr Kapasi is the
interpreter of the title, a middle-aged tour guide in India who
picks up an American family for a day's outing. The married couple
intrigue him, and he begins to picture their family life. 'They
were all like siblings, Mr Kapasi thought as they passed a row of
date trees. Mr and Mrs Das behaved like an older brother and
sister, not parents. It seemed that they were in charge of the
children only for the day.' When Mrs Das finds out that his job
during the week is as an interpreter in a doctor's surgery, she
presses him for more details. Eventually she asks for his address,
and as the day passes he begins to concoct romantic scenarios in
his head, but when they are left alone in the car the conversation
does not turn out as he had imagined. In another story, Lahiri
tracks the downward spiral of an aged Indian stairwell sweeper,
Boori Ma, drawing out with exquisite strokes the tiniest nuances
and events of her daily life, and the effect these have on her
eventual fate. Elsewhere, she constructs another character, Bibi
Haldar, who is fated to live as an outsider yet reclaims her own
strange dignity. And there are several stories which delve into
relationships to examine the progress of romance. In the first of
the collection, a couple are steeped in grief for their dead baby.
As the electricity is switched off and they are forced to resort to
candlelight at night, the metaphor is continued into their
relationship: the embers of their marriage are stoked into life one
last time. In the last story of the collection, a couple are
brought together in an arranged marriage on a new continent, both
grappling to adjust to the newness of the stiuation. In all her
stories, Lahiri is a fly on the wall, her own voice virtually
inaudible in this polished set of lyrical tales. But she relates
fragments rather than set-pieces, and her episodes in the lives of
aliens are all the more wistful because of it. (Kirkus UK)
A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland…
Jhumpa Lahiri's prose is beautifully measured, subtle and sober, and she is a writer who leaves a lot unsaid, but this work is rich in observational detail, evocative of the yearnings of the exile (mostly Indians in Boston here), and full of emotional pull and reverberation.
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