I haven’t read anything in English I’ve enjoyed as much as this collection of short stories in 18 months, back when I read a novel by Anthony Trollope.
God, people, what a book. I want to stand on street corners and cry and babble incoherently about it.
It’s hard to explain this but everything in this book is how I feel inside. I don’t just mean the first story which is about a couple whose baby was stillborn. I mean everything. It’s like this writer lives in my brain, it’s crazy. It’s not any particular events but the way of seeing the world.
I have no idea how I spent all this time managing not to read this amazing, amazing writer. On the negative side, I now want to camp out at the Indian restaurant because there’s a lot of Indian food in the book.
Interpreter of Maladies is available for free online in a pdf. Find it and read one of the stories. The first one is very sad, and each one is progressively better than the previous, so I recommend looking in the second half of the book.
Reading great literature is totally like sex but in a different part of the body. It’s total oblivion, relentless urgency, the world stopping, explosions in the brain.
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