R. K. Narayan (1906–2001)

R.K. Narayan is one of those rare writers who can make the personalities of his characters exude through the pages, without describing any of their physical features, and heck, even the environment around them.
You have no idea what year it is at any given moment, which places the novel takes place in, and how much time passes between the events. Indeed, Guide, like most of Narayan's work, is timeless - taking place in a time and era of his choosing, with the reader and the character both going through their motions dispassionately. Colonialism, the Partition, politics, sports - all of these might as well not exist for the protagonist, and I found myself liking the novel more and more as it went along.
For him, fate is more or less destined, and we are just Shakespeare's actors taking part in a play. Existentialism, absurdism, nihilism - all philosophies are toyed with and thrown out quickly and methodically. Raju makes his own beliefs, and labels are just that - labels.
I never said, "I don't know." Not in my nature, I suppose. If I were inclined to say, "I don't know what you're talking about," my life would have taken a different turn.
You would think that Raju would cynically utter them often reserved for nostalgic baby boomers. Still, Raju speaks them in a dispassionately passionate tone - one that is truly enlightened. He might be a fraudster, but he has the wisdom that actual saints would do well to learn.
The ambiguous ending and the misogyny that was never explicitly addressed made me not as absorbed in the novel as I wanted to be. Still, I can see the praise for Guide, and it is deserving of its status as one of the Indian classics.… (mer)

Narayan writes wry, understated stories about domestic life in small-town India during the twentieth century. The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories is filled with tiny heartbreaks and minute revelations; the modulated restraint is so sustained that the rare streaks of malice or wit in these stories are almost shocking. I think I prefer those shocks: the exquisite small-scale tone is so constant as to be numbing, while the louder stories (showcasing such outrageous emotions as distant self-loathing and vague confusion) are arresting. "Second Opinion" features a narrator cleaving both to and from his mother, "Annamalai" is an oblique portrait of the near-friendship between a writer and his gardener, and the eponymous "The Grandmother's Tale" is a family myth refracted through several separate speakers.… (mer)