PositiveThe RumpusThe book is a collection of short personal essays, each responding to different snapshots. At first glance the book looks like a memoir—or an autobiography, the word Malcolm would have preferred. But the pictures offer a more nuanced reading ... Those who have accused Malcolm of being brutal and cold will find in this book yet another example of her “pitiless prose.” For them Still Pictures will be a failed memoir, and that may be a fair assessment. However, if one reads it as a work of criticism, another possibility opens up.
Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveThe RumpusEvery chapter is a little story with a seemingly trivial anecdote, but reading one after another forces the reader to share the sense of dislocation the character feels. However, this feeling is not static. There is a narrative arc ... one concludes that Lahiri has become a more laconic writer, like Cesare Pavese and Antonio Tabucchi. Her preoccupations remain the same, but her prose has narrowed the scope of her observations: rather than describing the richness of colors, she now meditates on the light; her characters are now nameless and don’t have families in different countries, but they are still outsiders; what gets lost in translation when someone uses a second or third language to communicate with others remains at the center of her work, only now it feels like a silent struggle that others hardly notice, a secret. Inevitably, one will compare her work in English to her work in Italian. In doing so, readers should remember that, as the poet Wisława Szymborska once wrote, every beginning is only a sequel. In this sequel, Lahiri has gained more than she’s lost.
