Customer Reviews

The dark room

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I was so overcome by this book. This is the first works I have read by Narayan and I was thoroughly pleased. What makes it so well written is the reality with which Narayan captures the culture of India and defines the roles that governed marriages in the 1930's. I must admit he is not too far off base in depicting marriage arrangements and the struggles of women in the 21st century. At times I was disappointed with its realism, the speech, the actions of the characters. It was all too familiar. A powerful and honest portrayal of how husbands and wives act in marriage.

This is Narayan's third published work. Once again it is set in his famous fictional world of Malgudi. This work is the most "adult" of the three, discussing serious issues like relations between husband and wife & men and women, raising children, work, (ir)religion, and even petty crime. Everything has a dark cast and much of the activity happens at night. For example, the wife has had two miscarriages. This short novel, really almost a shortish novella, has two parts. The first focuses on a wealthy husband who hires a woman at his office and then who becomes infatuated with her, neglecting his wife of about 15 years to spend time with her. The second part focuses on the neglected wife who leaves home and winds up working in a temple to survive. Their three children are important motivators in each part. The title of the story refers to a part of their house where the wife, who battles serious depression at times, goes when she is depressed. So for her both the room and her mood are dark, as is the overall feel of the work. I found the later part of the first half a bit of a slog, almost giving up on the work. But I'm glad I didn't as I couldn't put the second part down. I had to know what happened to the wife. But with most of his works, Narayan really doesn't care whether the reader gets closure on the characters and their life issues. He chooses to end the book how and when he wants. So don't expect an all-encompassing wrap up that will give strong clues as to the definitive long-term outcome for these characters. The events are as they are and the interactions between husband and wife remain raw, especially for the times.

This work is not for anyone expecting Narayan to continue the lighter, more humorous looks at Indian life in the 1930s as show in his first two novels, Swami & Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. Narayan, born 1906, was 32 when this was published in 1938. He married in 1933 to a 15-year-old girl and his father had died in 1937. (The darkness in the book was mirrored in his life in 1939 when his wife died.) But as Graham Greene wrote, anyone who reads Narayan's works centered on Malgudi comes to have an understanding, in a way that only a series of novels can bring out, of how the "average" Indian lived and how their world evolved over the course of about 50 years from British-controlled colonialism to independence.