Criticism
Jennifer Bess, “Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” Explicator, 62 (Winter 2004):
125–128.
Discusses “Mrs. Sen’s,” “This Blessed House,” and “The Third and Final Conti-
nent,” illustrating how characters’ relationships to small details—a cutting knife, a
Jesus trivet, the word “splendid”—signify cultural identity, individual identity, and
human connection or its lack.
Noelle Brada-Williams, “Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as a
Short Story Cycle,” MELUS, 29 (Fall/Winter 2004): 451–464.
Through strong close readings, points to dialogues between the stories in the col-
lection to argue that they form a short-story cycle not through the more common
unity of setting or recurring characters but through pattern and motif, “including
the recurring themes of the barriers to and opportunities for human communica-
tion; community... and the dichotomy of care and neglect.”
Judith Caesar, “American Spaces in the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri,” ESC, 31
(March 2005): 50–68.
Discusses “The Third and Final Continent” and “Nobody’s Business,” a short
story published in The New Yorker (12 March 2001), in terms of the ways they
rewrite the traditional American motif of the confining enclosure of houses.
Caesar, “Beyond Cultural Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came
to Dine,’” North Dakota Quarterly, 70 (Winter 2003): 82–91.
Argues that Lahiri’s fiction does not fit into the categories of postcolonial, Asian
American, or American literature because it goes beyond those forms in offer-
ing recognitions of growth and suggesting that the past can, in fact, be learned
from and then moved beyond or that, like Mr. Pirzada, one can go home
again.
Brewster L. Fitz, “Bibi’s Babel: Treating Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Treatment of Bibi
Haldar’ as the Malady of Interpreters,” South Asian Review, 26, 2 (2005):
116–131.
Examines the use of a first-person-plural female narrator, arguing it is a kind of
“ghost interpreter-translator of maladies” that cures Bibi Haldar.
Joel Kuortti, “Problematic Hybrid Identity in the Diasporic Writings of Jhumpa
Lahiri,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Postcolonial Studies in Transition, edited
by Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 205–219.
Focusing primarily on “This Blessed House” but with references to others,
Kuortti examines the engagement with translation and spaces of hybridity in
Lahiri’s writing.
Simon Lewis, “Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” Explicator, 59 (Summer 2001):
219–221.
Discusses how the characters, plot, and setting of a tourist excursion in India of
“Interpreter of Maladies” rewrite E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) to place
the cause of human disconnection and misunderstanding in sources other than
geography and race.