Intepreter Of Maladies (4)

This one's been kind of beaten up already, but I'll add some thoughts anyway.

In a nutshell... it made me think of Buddhist statues.

Probably not Pulitzer Prize worthy, I definitely enjoyed discussing this one more than I enjoyed reading it. I feel that I read too much into the theme of these stories; taking the concept of "interpreter of maladies" as being the reader - the author presents people and their situations without critique, constructing a basis of information upon which we make our own judgements. I took the shallow character engagement as a deliberate treatment so as to not lead the reader to a particular point of view.

I found the values and themes of the stories to be quite foreign to my personal life experience (I'm not referring to the cultural sense). This seemed somewhat at odds with the interpretation that most readers had whereby they saw the stories as everyday human events. I nearly gave up on the book at one point for this very reason.

There's not much value in going down to the level of individual story reviews, but it was whilst reading "This Blessed House" that I started thinking about cultural heritage and the responsibilities of preservation (i.e. who is responsible for preserving the cultural history of one since passed?). I knew I was meandering to a tangent for I doubt this was an intentional theme of the author; although it was alluded to in the Intepreter Of Maladies story (where I knew trouble was brewing the moment they mentioned monkeys - cheeky little things they are). A number of years ago I was terribly angered when Taliban forces destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan and my mental wanderings took me back to that memory.

Another theme of "This Blessed House" was that of the futile rage of ineffective masculinity, but of course I don't really know anything about that :-)

Like previous posts mention, the short story idea was a refreshing change and I learned a key lesson from these tales...

"You shouldn't judge people based on where they live, that's what they do in Russia"




The two little black dots near the bottom (central) are people sitting down.