Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967-), was born in London of Indian parents and grew up in Rhode Island (USA). She completed her higher education in Boston University.
Though she has lived outside India most of her life, it is India, or rather the idea of India in the minds of expatriate Indians that forms the substance of her short stories and novel. Her writing brings out the sense of nostalgia and yearning in her characters through a fluid Chekovian description of their simple lives and ordinary actions.
Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999.
Works
- Interpreter of Maladies
- The Namesake
- Unaccustomed Earth
Interpreter of Maladies
Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of elegant short stories telling the lives of Indians in exile, of people navigating between the strict traditions they have inherited and the baffling New World they must encounter every day.
An interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing revelation; a young Midwestern woman is drawn into a tantalising affair with a married Bengali man; the eccentric, nervous Mrs. Sen needs to learn to drive if she is to keep her job minding eleven-year-old Eliot after school; a young couple exchange confesssions each night as they struggle to cope with the loss of their baby and their failing marriage; and Mr. Pirzada, whose watch is always set to Dacca time, worries about his family back in Pakistan.
Whether set in Boston or Bengal, these sublimely understated stories, spiced with humour and subtle detail, speak with universal eloquence to anyone who has ever felt the yearnings of exile or the emotional confusion of the outsider.