Description
A delightful collection from India’s foremost storyteller, Under the Banyan Tree adds twenty-eight tales of the rich and colorful heritage of R K Narayan’s fictional south Indian city, Malgudi. Narayan’s characters, observed with a wry and compassionate eye, come from every area of Indian society – merchants, beggars, herdsmen, hermits, teachers, rogues – and represent in miniature a wealth of human experience. A rebellious young man refuses to honor a vow made by his parents in an ancestral temple long ago in Nitya. A shopkeeper is made bankrupt by a charming stranger in A Career. In other tales, a schoolteacher indulges for one traumatic day in the luxury of telling the truth; a nervous small boy, forced to sleep alone to prove his courage, catches a burglar; a browbeaten clerk triumphs over his stars, and a ghost is laid to rest. Outstanding in this superb book is the masterpiece A Horse and Two Goats, drawn from a collection now no longer available, and the marvelous title story, about the divine gift of storytelling itself. Like the storyteller in Under the Banyan Tree, R K Narayan is an enchanter, a weaver of words who keeps his audience spellbound with the rhythms and haunting images of his tales. Drawn from the marketplace, the mountainside, the dusty street, and the river bank, these gentle, ironic, finely observed stories of village and city life demonstrate the power of fiction at its best. Read more books on Fiction Category.
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