A short story
Once in a while you encounter a little thing that restores your faith in the whole thing.
This short story is my little thing today. It is one of the finest I’ve read in a long time, and it made me reflect on how beautiful the short story structure is. Its brevity, its succinctness; how no word, no element, is wasted, no movement arbitrary.
A Temporary Matter, the first in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, exhibits this for me. Just a few pages, just a few quiet paragraphs, and it disturbs me today just as when I first read it standing along the aisle at PowerBooks.
