Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Narayan, R(asipuram) K(rishnaswami) (Vol. 28) - John Updike

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JOHN UPDIKE

[When] Naipaul visited India for the first time, he found that "Narayan's novels did not prepare me for the distress of India" [see excerpt above]…. (p. 84)

Narayan's most recent book, a collection of short stories called "Malgudi Days" …, tends to illustrate [what Naipaul called a] "Hindu response to the world."… Hinduism is not infrequently bound into the substance of [Narayan's] short stories: in one, "Iswaran," a student so thoroughly immerses himself in the visions of "a Tamil film with all the known gods in it" that he allows an imaginary horse to carry him into a river and drown; in another, "The Snake-Song," a man plays the flute with such inspiration that the god Naga Raja, a great black cobra, appears and compels him to play the same song all night long…. A certain benign indifference presides above these tales, causing them to flicker out inconclusively…. The older stories, especially—selected from the previous collections...

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1. Introduction
2. William Walsh
3. V. S. Naipaul
4. Perry D. Westbrook
5. Harish Raizada
6. Joyce Carol Oates
7. Laurence Lafore
8. Lakshmi Holmstrom
9. John Updike
10. M. M. Mahood
11. V. S. Naipaul
12. K. S. Narayana Rao
13. Graham Greene
14. George Woodcock
15. Ashok Aklujkar
16. Peter Green
17. Jack Beatty
18. Robert Towers
19. John Updike
20. Copyright

1. John Updike