Interpreter of Maladies

Without exception, the central theme of each story in Interpreter of Maladies has to do with empathy for the other, either in the phenomenological sense, which concerns the way our perceptions of someone else influence and interfere with our understanding of them, or in the related phenomena first outlined in Edward Said’s Orientalism, which argues that Western colonialist history has created a divide between the Western Occident and the Eastern Orient, with the concept of the Orient as described in centuries of colonialist writing having an enormous sway over how Westerners engage with Asian cultures. Since most of the characters in this collection are immigrants of Indian or Bangladeshi descent, these two concepts are often interrelated throughout the stories: An immigrant’s national and cultural identity are inextricably tied to their interpersonal relationships in a way that is often invisible for non-immigrants.

In the phenomenological sense, characters’ assumptions about each other drive their behavior, and in stories like “A Temporary Matter” and “Interpreter of Maladies,” the epiphany that the viewpoint characters experience has to do with their assumptions about the other being challenged by the person’s intentions or confessions: Shoba is not using the confessional game to bring them closer together as Shukumar expects, and