Customer Reviews

The Crows of Deliverance: Stories

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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.