Contemporary Literary Criticism | Sidhwa, Bapsi - Patricia Craig (review date 26 September 1980)

Patricia Craig (review date 26 September 1980)

SOURCE: Craig, Patricia. “Junglewalla & Co.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4043 (26 September 1980): 1057.

[In the following review, Craig compliments the elements of black comedy in The Crow Eaters.]

Indian society offers plenty of targets for the humorist, though it hasn't, at any rate in novels written in English, generated, too much straightforward comic fiction. It is more common to find an ironic perspective suddenly lightening a very serious undertaking, as in the novels of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Bapsi Sidhwa, however, in a sprightly first novel [The Crow Eaters] shows that black comedy is by no means alien to the spirit of Indian writing. Her Parsi hero Faredoon (Freddy) Junglewalla, is one of those beguiling rogues whose exploits make such entertaining reading—in the tradition, if not quite in the class, of Basil Seal.

Freddy's efforts to further his interests are...

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