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January 01, 2004
Short Bursts of Joy
My white tulips died yesterday and I was depressed for a while. For they had barely lasted three days and they were so pretty. Alan tells me, "But they are flowers! They must die! Like all beauty!" But I would hear nothing of it. I like eternity, I like forever, I like happily ever after. For the same reasons I do not like fireworks, but only the concept of them, perhaps now then, I will not like flowers and only the idea of them.
For the same reason, perhaps, I had never been much of a fan of short stories. For me, a story has to be weaved and spun into a beautiful tapestry. Short stories happen too fast and end too quick, there is never enough time to feel adequately for the characters. Yesterday, at the hair salon, I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies and finished reading it there and then.
It was a simply fantastical journey. Taking a peek into the lives of her characters who are torn between new and old worlds. I laughed with them and cried with them. Everyone should read this book. One feels intermittently for her characters at the point of her last word. The disappointment, the regret, the hope they have for their lives. The futility or the inevitability of all lives. She has an gently poignant pen that does not allow for melodrama but evokes the most of emotions.
The protogonist of her last stories very sagely shares that:
"Still, 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. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
(lainey's addition:with every book I read!)
That is the certain curiosity she had used on her stories which has kept me rapt. And that is the spirit I would like to bring into my life and my new year (if I haven't already).
Posted by lainey at January 1, 2004 03:40 PM