/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}: “Interpreter of Maladies” ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

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Saturday, March 13, 2010

“Interpreter of Maladies” ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

“Interpreter of Maladies” ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

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Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection. Take, for example, Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A Temporary Matter", whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn child. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job, working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. His fare on this particular day is Mr. and Mrs. Das - first-generation Americans of Indian descent - and their children. During the course of the afternoon, Mr. Kapasi becomes enamoured of Mrs. Das and then becomes her unwilling confidant when she reads too much into his profession. "I told you because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling secret. I'm tired of feeling so terrible all the time. Eight years, Mr. Kapasi, I've been in pain eight years. I was hoping you could help me feel better; say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy. Of course, Mr. Kapasi has no cure for what ails Mrs. Das - or himself. Lahiri's subtle, bittersweet ending is characteristic of the collection as a whole. Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Yet the situations Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend ethnicity. As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final Continent," comments: "There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family.

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Interests: Schizophrenia, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Autism... Andrzej Tarkovsky... Ingmar Bergman... Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera... M.D. Ramanathan, Kumar Gandharva... J.S. Bach, Wagner...

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}

~ The {Title} is taken from Borges' {The Library at Babel} ~

Borges' "The Library at Babel" is a story that encompasses a world. The world that is a library, a library that is a universe broken into endless hexagons connected by stairs and hallways. It's unlike any library that has ever existed, a library of the mind, a virtual library, and as such the source of imaginative illustration. I've encountered pictures of its hexagonal galleries and infinite air shafts on Web Sites, and recently the story was re-published in hardcover with engravings by Erik Desmazieres, who gave the Library's interior a spooky look that I associate with the interiors of Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction. Many, of course, would choose to interpret the story in a more philosophical manner. Certainly a case can be made to see the story as a parable about man's search for God, or man's essential ignorance of the world, or of the chaos of the universe. While I acknowledge the story's visual and philosophical qualities, it has a personal connection. It evokes what I would call the large-library experience. Borges' nameless librarian, an administrator of some minor sort - if the library is infinite, all administrators are minor - recollects, "Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book." Reading this, I think of my own rambles through stacks and shelves both as a student and an unattached "scholar." I've wandered through libraries looking for or just at books, feeling their collective weight, reading titles, puzzling at the cipher of numbers and letters by which they are classified. I have been lost in corridors of books like one drifting through the pinched streets of some foreign town, though indeed these rambles have taken part in and around my home. Books as realia have been part of this attraction. Strolling between shelves of bound volumes, I feel I'm pressed between the scales of some vast and dormant beast. Opened, each book presents a small bracket of hard space and distilled experience that, when joined in imagination with other books, create the sensation of time congealed. Books in vast quantities form a reality greater than the sum of their parts. Unlike museums, whether of science or art, that enfold me in a history of eras and schools and "movements," large libraries point beyond their realia. They go from the tangible to the intangible, from the temporal to the timeless, from the momentary to the eternal. Masses of books suggest the infinite. - Garrett Rowlan

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My Eternal Lover & Mentor ~
"Jorge Luis Borges"

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The movement of atoms is eternal.

Thrown through the void,
either by their own weight
or by the impact of other atoms,
they wander
until chance brings them together.

Some of them manage to cling together;
they form the most solid bodies.

Others,
more mobile,
are separated by a greater distance;
they form the less dense bodies,
air and light.

Some did not wish to be admitted to any group;
they move around gloriously and endlessly in space,
like dust motes lit up by rays of light in a dark room.

[from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, recited by Rousseau in La vallée close]

~ This seemingly simple poetry reminds us that every work of Art is relative to the Grand Time wherein it was sprout, and is to be judged thus. We won't/ might not hold a good opinion when we read and consider these lines now, after two decades of Stephen Hawking and 'A Brief History of Time'. This poem was written in First Century BC, by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Now, do we ought to re-think and re-consider our opinion? Epicurean Physics, atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, arguments about God, Lucretius' Physics - everything is here, in these simple lines of poetry ~

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/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}