Customer Reviews

The Painter of Signs (Penguin Classics)

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This bittersweet novel is as fresh and charming today as it was when originally published in 1976. Telling the story of Raman, a conscientious sign-painter, who is trying to lead a rational life, the novel is filled with busy neighborhood life and gossip, the alternating rhythms and sounds of the city from morning till night, and the pungent smells and tantalizing flavors of home cooking, as Narayan portrays everyday life in Malgudi. The city is growing and changing, as its inhabitants try to carve out some individual successes within the juggernaut of "progress."

Raman, a college graduate, brings a sense of professionalism to his sign-painting, taking pride in his calligraphy and trying to create exactly the right sign, artistically, for each client. Living with his aged aunt, a devout, traditional woman whose days are spent running the house and tending to her nephew's needs and whose evenings are spent at the temple listening to the old stories and praying, Raman prefers a rational approach to life. Then he meets Daisy. A young woman devoted to improving the lives of women and the standard of living of the country through strict family planning, Daisy becomes his biggest customer, commissioning signs for all the family planning clinics she helps establish through the city and outlying rural areas. Ram soon finds his attraction to Daisy more powerful than this desire to remain "rational."

Narayan is a master of domestic scenes, presenting the major and minor conflicts of family life through the different points of view of the participants. Respect for his characters and a good-humored (and often humorous) presentation of their issues give warmth to his scenes and allow the reader to feel real empathy with the characters. Raman's belief in his own rational enlightenment and his simultaneous vulnerability to Daisy's manipulations provide the author with unlimited opportunities for dramatic irony. Scenes between Ram and his devout, elderly aunt provide a glimpse of the conflicts between old and new India, in addition to the generational conflicts every family faces between its young and its old. Scenes between Ram and Daisy reflect the changes in the role of women in society, as women become more assertive and liberated. Though he is presented as a unique, individualized character, Ram, the painter of signs, is, in a sense, Everyman, facing his coming-of-age as all men before him have done in cultures around the world. Only the details (and the sights, and sounds, and smells) are different. Mary Whipple

One of Narayan's most imaginative works; it speaks of human agency and feminism. Its aimless male protagonist becomes infatuated with a visionary career woman; she alone infuses meaning into his tepid life. The novel is short and easy to read by design (perhaps)- it leaves its reader unsatisfied and begging for more. My favorite Narayan novel so far.

Narayan's The Painter of Signs is considerably more than a charming travelogue or a narrow slice of provincial Indian life. While giving us all of that and with considerable charm, Narayan creates characters and situations that touch the heart and delve deeply into the essential contradictions of human life.

While some, including Monica Ali, who wrote the informative introduction to the latest edition call Narayan a comic writer, he can more accurately be called a serio-comic one. This book, like many of his novels, has its tragic components.

There is a basic dichotomy within Daisy, the committed family planner and sexually repressive young woman. Similarly, Raman yearns to be a rationalist but finds himself overcome by sexual thoughts. Thus, when the two young people inevitably get together, it creates a hopeless tension that finally destroys their relationship.

The complications of their "modern" love story is played out against the tranquil life of Raman's aunt, who has her act together. This would all seem cheery if we didn't know that the aunt is leaving Malgudi to go to Benares, the holy city, to die, alone, separated from Raman, her surrogate child. (Raman's parents were victims of modern life--killed in a railway accident.)

While the book gives us considerable insight into daily Indian life, it gives us even more into the lives of young people trying to find their way in a world changing before their very eyes. Narayan does not avoid the controversies of the times. Set in the days of Mrs. Gandhi's Emergency, Painter of Signs deals with the contradictory impulses of family planning: to make a good life for some, we deny potential life for others, an ironic opposition almost no one on either side of the issue is willing to confront, probably because it is basically unsolvable. And Narayan sees that. At the end of the book, Daisy is off on her Quixotic quest to limit births; the aunt is deprived of her home; and Raman is left with only his memories of the time with Daisy. He returns to the lesser life of The Boardless and his cronies , and his own business life as a minor artist, a painter of signs.

Narayan has painted for us a very charming and deceptively simple picture of the complexities of Indian and human life.

This is the first book of Narayan's I've read. I read it mainly because Graham Greene, one of my favorite authors, was a long-time proponent of Narayan's works. I fully concur with Greene that Narayan is a nuanced writer who achieves great effect with a few carefully selected words. I see how Greene came to feel that he "knew" India and Indians from reading Narayan's multi-decades stories of the fictional city of Malgudi and its surroundings. Like America's Faulkner, Narayan creates a fully realized place which comes alive to the reader, both in setting and its various characters. I truly believed I was in India around 1973. It is hard not to love Raman, the opinionated sign painter. While it is hard to love Daisy, the westernized birth controlling technocrat, I found the relationship between the two both exotic and mesmorizing. I couldn't put the book down and had to know how his infatuation-turned-love ended. I appreciated how chaste the book is both in its choice of words and description of events. The book is simple yet beautiful. I loved this book so much that I gave it to my daughter to read this summer before she matriculates at college. I now plan on reading Narayan's earlier works.

As a big fan of Narayan's collection of short stories "Malgudi Days", I wasn't sure what to expect of this novel. The premise sounded interesting enough, with the jolting of Raman the sign-painter's world with the entrance of a love interest.

All three main characters are interesting in their own ways. The protagonist, Raman, is an utterly sympathetic bachelor who didn't know what he had until he lost it. Daisy, the love interest, is a pig-headedly modern and unbending feminist with a mission to lower the national birth rate. Raman's aunt, an old-fashioned matriarch, is ironically more liberated than the so-called feminist, Daisy, by deciding to finally do what she has always wanted.

As with Narayan's "Malgudi Days", there are so many messages and symbolism in this book. It is interesting that Narayan explores two female characters who are such polar opposites of one another that they are more like caricatures. Nevertheless, this is a great book that warrants another reading with fresh eyes in another few years for mw!

I read this book years ago but never forgot it. I read it again this week and was in awe of its deceptive simplicity. On the surface, it seems like nothing more than a love story, but then there is Daisy-- the antithesis of a romantic heroine: abrasive, brusque, rigidly obsessed with ideals and principles-- in sum, kind of a bitch. But isn't it always the people who don't fit into our preconceived ideas of what a person should be who drive us to distraction? So it is with Daisy, who is perhaps attractive to Raman because of her near-complete indifference to him; so unlike his aunt; so unlike the tradition-bound life he both loves and longs to escape.

A beautiful, entertaining read.

This bittersweet novel is as fresh and charming today as it was when originally published in 1976. Telling the story of Raman, a conscientious sign-painter, who is trying to lead a rational life, the novel is filled with busy neighborhood life and gossip, the alternating rhythms and sounds of the city from morning till night, and the pungent smells and tantalizing flavors of home cooking, as Narayan portrays everyday life in Malgudi. The city is growing and changing, as its inhabitants try to carve out some individual successes within the juggernaut of "progress."

Raman, a college graduate, brings a sense of professionalism to his sign-painting, taking pride in his calligraphy and trying to create exactly the right sign, artistically, for each client. Living with his aged aunt, a devout, traditional woman whose days are spent running the house and tending to her nephew's needs and whose evenings are spent at the temple listening to the old stories and praying, Raman prefers a rational approach to life. Then he meets Daisy. A young woman devoted to improving the lives of women and the standard of living of the country through strict family planning, Daisy becomes his biggest customer, commissioning signs for all the family planning clinics she helps establish through the city and outlying rural areas. Ram soon finds his attraction to Daisy more powerful than this desire to remain "rational."

Narayan is a master of domestic scenes, presenting the major and minor conflicts of family life through the different points of view of the participants. Respect for his characters and a good-humored (and often humorous) presentation of their issues give warmth to his scenes and allow the reader to feel real empathy with the characters. Raman's belief in his own rational enlightenment and his simultaneous vulnerability to Daisy's manipulations provide the author with unlimited opportunities for dramatic irony.

Scenes between Ram and his devout, elderly aunt provide a glimpse of the conflicts between old and new India, in addition to the generational conflicts every family faces between its young and its old. Scenes between Ram and Daisy reflect the changes in the role of women in society, as women become more assertive and liberated. Though he is presented as a unique, individualized character, Ram, the painter of signs, is, in a sense, Everyman, facing his coming-of-age as all men before him have done in cultures around the world. Only the details (and the sights, and sounds, and smells) are different. Mary Whipple

The Painter of Signs is a good story, and it shows RK Narayan's capacity for wit and irony. The man could write, and it shows.

Yet I must disagree with the notion that The Painter of Signs is anything close to a great novel. We are told that Raman, the main character, is someone who wants to live in the Age of Reason, but we don't see it very much. Oh sure, he tires of his pious Aunt, who attends readings of the great Indian epics at the Temple every night, but that is not about the Age of Reason -- that's a standard intergenerational squabble. Similarly, Daisy, Raman's love, is a very flat character: she appears, she speaks, she does what she does. But we know very little about her. Narayan attempts to let us know her through relating what she tells Raman, but this almost seems like necessary background in order to make the plot move (which it does). In the end, she is a flat character.

I enjoyed the book, and it is a good read, but I find it a strangely muted window into India. As always, Narayan's description of the people and life of Malgudi are terrific and at times laugh-out-loud funny. But if you are looking for fiction that tells you about India, I would suggest first going to The White Tiger, by Arvind Adiga, Salman Rushdie's brilliant Midnight's Children, or even Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, much of which is not about India per se but rather the Indian expatriate community in the United States. Another work that is based on fiction and has been unfortunately overlooked is Jonah Blank's beautiful Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India, which really gets to the heart of key aspects of Indian culture.

My own view is that one compelling reading of The Painter of Signs is one that Narayan would have abhorred, namely, a political reading. Narayan didn't like critics finding allegories in his books, but I think it works here. Raman is India itself, torn between its rich traditions (the Aunt) and a seductive modernity (Daisy). Narayan does not choose between these two, and he was hardly a defender of traditional India, but a political reading of The Painter of Signs shows him (or the text) cautioning about the embrace of modernity that cannot deliver what it promises -- or what a person might convince himself that it promises if he is infatuated by its appearance.

THE PAINTER OF SIGNS IS A VERY GOOD BOOK.IT IS ABOUT A PAINTER IN THE IMAGINARY TOWN OF MALGUDI.HIS NAME IS RAMAN.HE LIVES AT HOME WITH HIS AUNT WHO TAKES CARE OF HIM.SHE TOOK CARE OF HIM FROM THE TIME HIS PARENTS DIED.SHE IS A VERY RELIGIOUS PERSON AND GEOS TO THE TEMPLE EVERYDAY.RAMAN PAINTS SIGNS FOR DIFFERENT TYPES OF PEOPLE.FOR EXAMPLE:THE BANGLE SELLER.ONE DAY HE IS ASKED TO PAINT A SIGN BY THIS LADY.RAMAN GETS ATTRACTED TO THIS LADY,DAISY,AND STARTS VISITING HER.MEANWHILE,DAISY IS PLANNING A BIRTH CONTROL CAMPAIGN.SHE IS GOING TO VISIT SOME OF THE REMOTE VILLAGES TO EXPLAIN THIS.SINCE,RAMAN HELPS HER SHE DECIDES TO TAKE RAMAN WITH HER.WHY DON'T YOU READ THIS VERY GOOD BOOK TO FIND OUT THE RESULTS OF THE CAMPAIGN AND WHAT HAPPENS TO RAMAN AFTER THIS.

yes.. this book is a real masterpiece...
actually most of nowadays's main issues are evocated!
for instance, there is lot of allusions of indira gandhi's campaign( nerhu 's daughter) of sterilization ..
there is also mentioned the corruption of our societies, the phenomenon of sexualiy( which is more and more here in our everyday life)
raman 's main issu is his disatifaction whith life.... he sees himself as taking part of this corruption , because he serves all his corrupted costumers....he can't accept his ederly aunt's beliefs since he is a rationalist.. he is stubborned in his vision of life : no one can makes him change his mind...
moreover, he thinks that he is under-rated by people.... his pofessional values aren't recognized and he suffers from it.
his conception of life change when he meets daisy ( by the way, her name puzzled him a lot because even if her aspect is quite traditional , her name isn't. )
daisy is a strong woman who's quite different from other indan's women...
first of all, she lives alone!!( and that's quite unusual)
morever , she is a symbol of feminism since she works on her own and she doesn't need a husband to take care of her... She is a woman who acts like a man.
raman immediatly fall in love with her, because of her " unusual personality".
well, i advice you to read this book , because all along it , we have references to raman's thoughts which are really true..
the author has quite an objective look on our world... and it'll makes you think...