"Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri was a phenomenally powerful tale of how people deal with a spouse's infidelity, and the other member of the relationship looking for the same feeling outside of the original relationship.The character of Mir
anda struggles with the fact that her husband followed a woman off of the plane that he was on when he was supposed to be heading home, leaving Miranda alone with herself. She meets a man named Devajit (Dev) and begins a new and exciting relationship with. She and Dev go from the thrill of the newness, the bickering and mediocrity and the begin of the decline of such a relationship, all the way to finding out that it isn't working out at all.
The central theme of the story as I see it though, is identity. Miranda hadn't identified herself as sexy since she had gotten married and felt even worse after her husband left her for a stranger on an airplane. When Dev began to call h
er sexy, she felt loved, beautiful, new, all over again. She was identified once again as something special. Sexy.
Dev, on the other hand is only identifying her as sexy because he knows he can get her to do anything when he says that. He never truly means what he tells Miranda, but she believes it. He identifies her as a mistress. Miranda does her best to keep her relationship with Dev, but it deteriorates because of Dev's waning interest in Miranda. A relationship is impossible to keep from falling apart if both parties are in it for different reasons. Along with the relationship as a whole, those identities also tend to decay, leaving people as single, and often incomplete. Miranda doesn't let that happen to her. Her relationship with Dev proved to her that men still find her attractive and to be a woman of great beauty, and she is able to tell herself once again that SHE is sexy.
I do agree that Miranda loves that Dev finds her "sexy." I think that him finding her attractive is all she really needed to feel loved. After being left she was lonely and felt mediocre. I really enjoyed the story because of little sense of drama that was displayed and the what could have been aspect.
ReplyDeleteI think that in this story the center of what drew Miranda to Dev is not he need to feel attractive. I do believe that she needs that but I think the need to not be lonely. Dev brought her a false sense of having someone there for her with his little phone calls and messages but in reality she is still alone.
ReplyDeleteGreat review. I also made one, by the way! Hope you can check it if you have time. :-) Best wishes for your literary flame!
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