The short story “A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri – or rather an excerpt from it – was the other text that Bavarian candidates for the Abitur exam could choose to analyse.
The New York Times gives us the whole text, which comes from the collection of short stories named after one of them, “The Interpreter of Maladies”. (Nitpicking remark: The date given on the exam text is wrong; the collection was published in 1999, not 2000.) –
And there is a review, of course. Under the title “Subcontinental Drift”, Caleb Crain calls Jhumpa Lahiri “Samuel Richardson’s latest heir”, in an allusion to Richardson’s novel “Pamela”:
ill-advised marriages have been one of fiction’s most fertile subjects, ever since Squire B. abducted Pamela
Caleb Crain obviously liked Lahiri’s tales, because he compliments her on her strong and likeable characters:
In Lahiri’s sympathetic tales, the pang of disappointment turns into a sudden hunger to know more.
It is a hunger the reader will share, because Lahiri’s characters are charmers.
This “sympathy” that is mentioned here also comes up in Charles Taylor’s review for Salon.com: he calls it Lahiri’s “ardor of empathy”.
The very commendable site “Voices from the Gaps” surprised me with this charming metaphor: “It all started in 1999 when Jhumpa Lahiri quietly exploded onto the literary scene.” :-)
Quite a lot of material on this young Indian-American author has been gathered at this web site of the National University of Singapore (part of the very useful “Postcolonial Web”).
Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest publication is again a collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (cf. Amazon.com for details). The Atlantic ran an interview with the author (18 March 2008).
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