I think the Wall St. Journal review says it best, “Eloquent….a writer of uncommon sensitivity and restraint.” Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book of fiction, a collection of short stories – Interpreter of Maladies has won numerous awards including a Pulitzer prize. For anyone who loves short stories, this is a must read. Lahiri’s stories are subtle, haunting, and beautifully written. From the Indian American couple recovering from still birth of their first child, to the epileptic girl who overcomes her patron’s rejection to create a life for herself, these stories’ characters are sensitively drawn, leaving them etched into our subconscious. What does become of the woman who guards the stairway of an apartment complex, only to be kicked out after she loses all of her life’s savings?
My mother handed me this book a week ago and insisted that I read it. Once I started I realized I had already read it a year or two before. But I drank up the stories again, happily indulging in the beautiful writing.
Life is a constantly morphing thing. Just when you think you know where it’s all headed you wake up the next morning to a completely different view. The landscape has changed along with the seasons, but the trees are the same trees, only your view has changed. So you try to cling to the old things that used to comfort you, clinging to the familiar, but they provide little or no solace. The fears do not subside. At this point we have no choice but to surrender to the unknown.
that is where the real beauty lies.
It is not in the knowing, the familiar, the expected. But in the embracing of the unknown. a willingness to walk down a new path and to trust that everything is as it should be. perfect. as it is.
Schopenhauer said,”When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.”
Sometimes there are little glimpses of the perfection, amidst the mess. It is at those times we feel blessed beyond measure.
Keri Smith from The Wish Jar Journal
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
Schopenhauer
Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex is an epic story, the family history of Calliope Stephanides, a young girl who discovers at age fourteen that she is actually a boy, a hermaphrodite. Tracing the recessive gene that gives Cal his ingrown gonads, the story starts with Cal’s Greek grandparents in Turkey, and courses through time to the present – their escape from the Turkish massacre in Smyrna in the early, their new life in Detroit, their son Milton and cousin’s daughter Tessie, and on to Calliope’s eventual discovery of himself.
From a purely historical perspective, Middlesex makes an interesting read. Eugenides colorfully paints the long gone or far away eras of Greek village life 80 years ago, the crossing of the Atlantic to Ellis Island, the struggles of young immigrants in a new land, working on the assembly line at the Ford factory, bootlegging operations over the Canadian border, the Detroit riots of the 60s, and the hippies of the early 70s.
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Calvin’s dad answering questions, quoted from various Calvin and Hobbes books by Bill Watterson.
Q. Why does the sun set?
A. It’s because hot air rises. The sun’s hot in the middle of the day, so it rises high in the sky. In the evening then, it cools down and sets.
Q. Why does it go from east to west?
A. Solar wind.
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Then let me go to nature as I came from nature
to the great cycles of creativity that I have dimly, so dimly, understood . . .
When you commit my ashes to the ground . . .commit them!
For then one cycle of individual life will be over,
and a unit of nature will be separated into its minute parts
for participation in new ways,
as atoms rearrange in the mysterious slow seething of the world.
Just as I have come from infinity, so I return to infinity,
between which events, for a little time, I came to celebrate that miracle
which I could never fathom.
Therefore, when it is time . . . yield me dying,
yield me dead in this tradition-
-earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust–
in sure and certain hope that the dust which bloomed briefly
in my loving will bloom again, bloom again in the renewal of species,
each meaning according to its kind with not even a single day of the mayfly
scorned; that this dust will bloom again and again and always again
until the seas run dry and the mountains disappear.
Mary Jean Irion, 1970
from “Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation”
available from www.alibris.com