Narayan... cannot be too highly commended to those who want to understand the Indian mind or to know what life in India is like.
Narayan is one of the world's finest storytellers. His prose is pellucid, his affection for his characters subtle yet palpable, and his sense of timing and gift for drama quite remarkable. This volume provides an excellent sampling of his short fiction, generally considered his best work, though his numerous novels about the fictional Indian village of Malgudi are full of charm and evocative detail. This selection of new and old short stories covers 50 years of Narayan's writing life, an achievement marked by the collection's title piece, a new novella. "The Grandmother's Tale" is classic Narayan. A young boy has been sent to live with his industrious grandmother after his mother has her fourth child. The boy, our somewhat skeptical narrator, fidgets under his grandmother's strict regime until he becomes deeply involved, as do we, in the tale she slowly tells about her grandmother's unusual life. Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
This grouping of stories, most of which were published previously, confirms Indian novelist and short-story writer Narayan (Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories, 1985, etc.) as a writer who views narrative as an infinitely superior form of intelligence to mere reason. Says the Talkative Man, the narrator of a story called ``Judge,'' to his dubious audience: ``You demand an explanation! Do you? You won't get it. I will only quote my friend Falstaff in Shakespeare's play. He was asked to explain how or why of certain episodes. His reply was a No sir. `If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion'!'' Narayan, a Talkative Man himself, writes out of a love of the sound of human voices trying to make sense of the world. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Narayan sees the divine in the ordinary. -- Newsweek
Critics are right in comparing Narayan to Dickens. He summons up a whole city...and populates it with the kind of people of whom one would say in real life 'What a character!' -- Saturday Review
R. K. Narayan is a writer of towering achievement who has cultivated and preserved the lightest of touches. So small, so domestic, so quiet his stories seem; but great art can be very sly. -- The New York Review of Books
It is not too much to compare Mr. Narayan to Chekhov. -- The New York Times
