Ten members of my book club met last month to discuss Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. This was first time we've chosen a collection of short stories, and I'll admit I was a bit nervous about it. I mean, how exactly do you discuss short stories? Story by story? As a collection? Do you go over each one or just focus on a few? As the organizer, these are the thoughts I was stressing over prior to the meeting.How did it go, you ask? Here's what a couple of club members said:
"I really enjoyed myself and felt that was one of our best meetings yet."
"Short stories are great --- we should do this again!"
I think that about sums it up!
This really was one of our best meetings, and it had a lot to do with both the quality and format of this book. First off, the book is extremely well written. The language is simple yet powerful. And second, we realized that short stories (at least, good short stories) lend themselves very well to group discussion.
We ended up not discussing each individual story but rather focusing on the few that impacted us the most. Lahiri wrote about what one gal called "slices of life and not the pleasant slices either." These are the things that you would be least likely to tell someone else about you but that strongly influence who you are. During our discussion we touched on the themes that bring these stories together, the immigrant experience, the idea of culture shock, and the fact that all the stories seemed so real, so human.
We closed our discussion by asking a few questions from the book club edition of Table Topics' conversation cards. One question asked each member to sum up the book in one word. Some words chosen were: human, powerful, heart-wrenching, and realistic. I thought that was a great way to end the meeting.
---Heather Johnson
