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R. K. Narayan (1906--2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. The four novels collected here, all written during British rule, bring colonial India into intimate focus through the narrative gifts of this master of literary realism. Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan's beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in The English Teacher, Narayan's most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness. These pioneering novels, luminous in their detail and refreshingly free of artifice, are a gift to twentieth-century literature.… (more)
User reviews
I'm not sure what I expected when I decided to read Narayan, but what I got was not it. What I got was a masterfully rendered little story of a boy and his friends in rural southern India in the 1920s. It possesses the kind of narrative pleasure that one comes across only rarely.
The Dark Room Excellent too
The English Teacher
I am reminded of how John Gardner differentiated between sentiment and the sentimental. This book is high in genuine sentiment. It is based on Narayan's life when, after a period of prolonged bachelorhood after marriage, his wife came to live with him in the provincial town where he was a teacher of English. What fascinated, among other things, was all the detail about how Indians lived in the late 1940s. The writing is straightforward, the timeline chronological. There is no plot to speak of. The teacher's wife and child arrive at a large house the husband has selected for them. The lay out is rudimentary though spacious. I was astonished at how little they lived on, compared to the gluttonous West of that time. Narayan captures the smell of the place exquisitely, it dirtiness, its roads beaten down by the multitudes over millennia. Like Narayan's own wife, the professor here watches his die. It is a drawn out death though anything but predictable. In fact, it's gripping. The wife's parents show up to share the nursing duties. Later, the professor meets a soothsayer who channels his wife from "the other side." Highly recommended.