INDIANNEIS IN THE WRITING OF R.K.NARYANA AS REFLECTED IN THE FINANCIAL EXPERT. THE ENGLISH TEACHER AND MALGUDI DAYS. INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

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 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. This pioneering novel, luminous in its detail and refreshingly free of artifice, is a gift to twentieth-century literature. Malgudi Days is a very special book, but it also may well be a book for special tastes. A collection of thirty-two stories, most of which have been selected from two previously published collections, An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947) and Lawley Road (1956), Malgudi Days offers a mosaic of a life that seems to belong to a lost time. The tone of the stories belongs to the nineteenth century, to the world of Rudyard Kipling and O. Henry, to the days when stories were expected to have neat little plots, a touch of irony, and a surprise ending. R. K. Narayan has long ago mastered his form and techniques, but the result is a body of work that is not for everyone’s taste.