Out of Sorts: Jhumpa Lahiri
Jessica Olin, 4 March 2004
Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), was a collection of spare short stories, whose characters, many of them Indian, exist in a sort of permanent exile, living in America but never fully belonging to it. In her sprawling first novel, The Namesake, she revisits this territory and attempts to move beyond it.
The book opens onto a dingy domestic scene: Ashima...