Canter Bridge

I didn’t fall in love with this Pulitzer-prize-winning debut until the final chapter, but the glow of this delayed romance now reflects back upon the chapter-long stories that preceded it. Lahiri writes from the space between the old country and the America to which generations of transients have emigrated, ceasing in the process to belong entirely to their origin or their destination.

For Lahiri and the characters whose stories she so skillfully tells, the Old Country is India and the sector of America where all things are new-though just for the time it takes for them to become familiarly alien-is mostly Boston and its university communities.

Ms. Lahiri is eminently aware of the dignity, the indignities, and the battle to negotiate both of these that is the task of the perceived underdog when two cultures meet and quietly clash. It would not be difficult to locate this young author in the tradition of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, though their distinct ethnicities might veil the literary and spiritual genetics that link them.

In Maladies, Lahiri tells nine independent stories in prose that does not call attention to itself nor, except for the insightfulness it reveals, impress at first glance. Yet one grows fond of the no-nonsense accent with which she traces the small hopes—quite often shattered—the unrealized vanities, and the muffled blows that characterize the lives of Mr. Karpasi, Mrs. Sen, Bibi Haldar, and the nameless ‘Bengali bachelor like myself’. She recounts the latter man’s tale of transplantation to New England with his sari-clad wife in the first person, as though she knew the life of such a man from the inside out.

Though the author’s descriptive prowess is obvious from the outset, she clinches the reputation of this fine literary debut in her last chapter (‘The Third and Final Continent’) in the moment that the aforementioned Bengali bachelor stumbles upon the obituary of his former landlady in the Globe:

‘I had not thought of her in several months—by then those six weeks of the summer were already a remote interlude in my past—but when I learned of her death I was stricken, so much that when Mala looked up from her knitting she found me staring at the wall, the newspaper neglected in my lap, unable to speak. Mrs. Croft’s was the first death I mourned in America, for hers was the first life I had admired; she left this world at last, ancient and alone, never to return.’

One hopes that the recognition this book has earned will not inflate Lahiri’s style nor deflect the steady gaze that lends a remarkable authenticity to her gentle observations.