![]() ![]() (In a typical Lahiri story, we find ourselves milling in and around Harvard Square. ![]() ![]() She renounced the writerly flourish, never once played the exotic and - perhaps most astonishing - scaled her characters to actual human existence. With a background similar in outline to that of Zadie Smith, she nonetheless arrived at an entirely different imaginative enterprise. Lahiri herself was born in London, raised in America and is of Indian descent. Written in an elegant hush - even upon rereading, there isn't a single burned raisin in the mix - Lahiri's stories traced out the lives of various Bengali-Americans suffering through various stages of lovelorn distress. ![]() But an antidote for all these shticky, overprized Big Fiction doorstops quietly appeared in 1999, the short-story collection ''Interpreter of Maladies,'' by a young writer named Jhumpa Lahiri. ''ON almost every page of his writing,'' the critic Edward Thomas once complained about Walter Pater, ''words are to be seen sticking out, like the raisins that will get burned on an ill-made cake.'' Such is the state of literary prose these days: it is often so fine, so self-conscious, so unappeasably literary that it is awful, a cake baked almost exclusively from burned raisins. ![]()
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