I wanted to like this collection more, but there was something missing or it just wasn’t the right time to read it. Maybe the stories are just a little too polished, a little too clean. Like The Mother Garden, all of these stories involve some element of sickness or grief. But unlike The Mother Garden overall the book doesn’t feel balanced because of that focus.

“Pilgrims” is kind of intense and twisted with this weird dynamic of parents taking care of themselves seemingly at the expense of their children one of whom becomes barbaric in his grief. There’s something about “The Isabel Fish” (where the title of the collection comes from) that I liked at first, but it ended unconvincingly positive. “Stars of Motown Shining Bright” is an example of Chekov’s “rule” about the gun. Except as soon as the gun appeared I thought, “Oh great, a gun. Now someone’s gonna die.” But then it didn’t quite pan out how I expected, so it seemed like the gun shouldn’t have been so important.

That might be the weakness in these stories. They feel very crafted. It’s not an entirely bad thing, but I didn’t quite lose myself in the collected moments. It’s like the sort of painting where you find yourself appreciating the brush strokes more than the image as a whole. It’s great to have a clean technique, but that doesn’t necessarily make the sort of magic that pulls at your heart.

I watched the movie version of this story in the winter, thinking I’d already read the book — it was actually Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies that I’d read just before this one was published. I was worried I’d picture Kal Penn as Gogol the whole time and to some degree I did at the beginning. But even though the movie stays almost entirely true to the book (emitting some elements to trim the story to movie length), the scenes of the movie faded for the most part.

While I enjoyed the cinematic take, the book definitely wins out with the additional internal perspective on the main characters. There are some great dialogues and scenes that are well-captured on screen, especially since the film is so well-cast, but many of the best parts to me are those that can’t be shown visually: thoughts and reflections, unspoken truths. In many ways this could have been an epic story with the amount of time that it spans, but Lahiri lets lots of time pass between chapters. You still feel like you know the core characters intimately.

This year Lahiri published another collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, which will definitely go on my list right now.

I took this book and Disgrace out from the library at the same time, unsure if I would read both. I still didn’t have any of my holds in when I finished, so I started this one immediately afterwards. It was interesting to read the two so close to each other. There are a lot of thematic similarities in the stories, even though they are so different: Disgrace is set in modern times, while this book is set in an archaic era out in the farthest reaches of a vast empire (at least, I picture it as vast). The narrator is also an aging man consumed with thoughts of his deteriorating body and shifting desires. But it is also rooted in questions about power, the way it shifts and the way it is abused.

Coetzee’s writing style is so simple that it’s hard for me to feel overwhelmingly moved by his writing — though I suppose I have been moved by simple writing before, so it can’t just be that. I just didn’t find any evocative descriptive passages or singularly profound moments, but overall his stories are really compelling and often elegiac in a way I tend to appreciate. I think it may be that he says so much without actually saying it that his startling truths manage to feel all together ethereal.