Literary Context Presentaion: Jhumpa Lahiri

For my literary context presentation, I researched Jhumpa Lahiri. One of the most interesting aspects that I found was that she was born in London to Bengali Indian Immigrants and when she was only three they moved to the United States. She is an author of several different works, one being the Interpreter of Maladies, which was published in 1999 and won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A lot of her stories are about exile- people living far from home or moving to new places. In an interview with The Atlantic, she explains that she finds interest in imagining characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstance may be. She stated that oftentimes when someone grows up the child of an immigrant, they are always very conscious of what it might mean to be suddenly uprooted. This helps us understand where some of her ideas come from while she was writing her works.

Specifically, it is shown throughout the Interpreter of Maladies, which is a book collection of nine short stories. The fifth short story in the collection is called “Sexy” which we interpreted in class. It’s about a young white woman who has an affair with a married Indian man and is set in present day Boston. It’s a story about learning from mistakes and how our own decisions can influence others. Some of the themes include infidelity, the true differences between 'love' and 'lust,’ judgment and perspectives, relationships, and morality.

There are also many conflicts in the story, a few of these including an affair, secrets, self-image, culture, and even gender. The conflict that I wanted to look deeper into was culture, and one of the passages from the short story that displays this is on page 1651. It’s is when Miranda asks Dev a question, to pursue learning more about him and where he’s from, but he just kind of ignored her and never gave her an answer. He threw it off like he though she really didn’t care about him or his background, which proves the relationship was one-sided. Another passage that displays culture issues is on page 1654 when they went to the Mapparium. This is a significant part of the story because it makes it seem like there is a whole nother world Miranda doesn’t know about. A quote that supports this is, “He explained that many of the countries, like Siam and Italian Somaliland, no longer existed in the same way; the names had changed by now.” It shows how much Dev knows compared to her and how she is not very worldly and he is, which is simply what creates this conflict.

Works Cited:

Jhumpa Lahiri." Jhumpa Lahiri. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2017.

Chotiner, Isaac. "Jhumpa Lahiri." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media

Company, 18 Mar. 2008. Web. 10 May 2017.