COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
A collection of six stories, written originally in Hindi, that reflect a cosmopolitan experience with an Indian spin. Verma's Indians, whether in Europe or in India itself, have thrown off the old traditional ways and, of necessity, embraced the new, but the price paid is high. Now rootless, they are free to go everywhere but in reality belong nowhere. There is the narrator of ``Amalya,'' waiting in a foreign city for his papers, who observes how his friend's devotion to his distant mother is changed by an encounter with a local prostitute. In ``Last Summer,'' an architecture student has met a woman he loves in Vienna, and now back in India on vacation he must somehow discourage his parents' attempts to arrange a marriage to a local girl. An estranged husband in ``The Visitor,'' an academic who travels widely, sees his wife and daughter, who live in England, only occasionally. His wife, Indian-born as well, refuses to go back to India because it reminds her of her husband's infidelity. The title story is wholly Indian in setting but reflects more forthrightly the unbridgeable distance between the old and the new. A journalist in Delhi travels to a mountain town filled with crows (``a sort of transit camp for men and crows--on their way to deliverance'') in search of a long- lost and beloved brother who's become a holy man. Their eventual meeting, however, is a poignant reminder of the irreconcilable differences between them. Written in clear and deceptively simple prose, Verma's stories movingly describe men and women of a certain class caught on the cusp of change and trying uneasily to survive there. A noteworthy collection. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Hindi
Original Language: Hindi
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4.0 out of 5 stars
India's New Story movement and its "precision with passion",
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This review is from: Crows of Deliverance (Paperback)
Until his death in 2005, Nirmal Verma was considered one of India's premier short story writers--a leader of the Nai Kahani (New Story) movement. "To be poetic in structure and yet be narrative in intent" is the "tight-rope" act required by the story writer, writes Verma, citing Thomas Mann's recipe of "precision with passion." In an introduction to this collection, he numbers among his Western idols Isaac Babel, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and--above all--Chekhov. His writing also shows the influence of a decade spent in Prague, which he fled during the year of the Soviet invasion.
The six stories collected here, all originally published in Hindi, are remarkable for their range, yet uneven in their quality. There are three that stand out. "Amalya" tells of two men turned out of their basement apartment by a roommate bringing back a one-night stand on the coldest of nights; anger towards their friend becomes interest in (and concern for) the girl. In "The Visitor," an estranged father surprises his daughter with a stopover while in London and she is forced to play mediator between him and his former wife. The last story, "Deliverance," is the most powerful; it combines a traditional narrative with a spiritual study of a man seeking his brother who years earlier had become a reclusive "holy man." The other three tales ("The Gossamer," "Last Summer," and "The Morning Walk") are less memorable. The first of these, I suspect, suffered in translation (and its brevity does not help its lack of "precision"), while the last is freighted with an overdone magic realism rendered sophomoric by a "heavy" ending which, literally, twists in the wind. Nevertheless, even the least interesting of Verma's stories boasts passages and characters showing a mastery uncommon in the genre.
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