The protagonist of this story is a tiger! He is young and ferocious (as we all fancy we are), he faces the cruelties of the world (being made into a show animal), he reacts through murder and carnage (as might be natural for a tiger), and he evolves into a philosophical and detached being, no longer quite " a beast."

The story of his evolution into an enlightened soul is uplifting.
The message, I think, is that every soul, not just human, has a consciousness, and strives for something.

The proof in the power of Narayan's crystal clear narrative is that the reader feels for the tiger, respects him, and admires him for the soul he has become. (Few lucky folks can attain the state of this smart cat!) Like many Narayan stories, he tackles a challenging premise and makes it appear effortless.

READ THIS! READ THIS!

Is it true than only human beings can think? Do not animals have the ability to think? Well, never mind; but what if they did? Well, if animals did think, then you get a classic book, 'A Tiger for Malgudi' by name.

I picked this book up because R.K. Narayan is my favorite author. And when I read the title, I thought the story was about how a man-eater or something enters Malgudi and terrifies the townsfolk and the like. But the blurb bemused me. Wait a minute, this book is different, I thought.

And it really was. The entire story is narrated by a tiger. It recounts its younger days, how it gets caught and is made to perform in a circus, how it escapes only to be captivated by the magical powers of a saint who leads it into the forest. An entertaining philosophical discourse follows, and finally the saint entreats the tiger to enter the protection of a zoo.

The entire novel can be completed in a couple of hours, but when one recounts the tale, one will break into fits of laughter. The humor and sarcasm are so very characteristic of Narayan. And there is no better scene in the story as the one when the tiger enters a local school. If anything, you'll discover India in that one scene.

From page one I was entranced by the intricity of this marvelous book. It runs back to the times of the ancients, and uncovers their wisdom in a way never heard before. I absolutely love this amazing book.

If you haven't yet discovered the pleasures of R.K. Narayan, I highly recommend The Financial Expert. It is nothing less than a classic. Superbly written, with humorously human characters and a well observed story. We follow the successes and of Margayya, the "financial expert" who lives in Narayan's fictional Malgudi. His story is amusing and entertaining. Narayan is a wonderful writer. Enjoy.

The book is about the life of an Indian chettiar (money-lender) and on his relationship with his son. Narayan's command of the English language is second to none and yet the book is extremely readable. Although set in India, the book will appeal to everyone: it is a good and interesting story, written in excellent English. ALL IN ALL, A FANTASTIC BOOK !

It is through this book that I began my love affair with Mr. Narayan's writing. His characters are wry and ironic and clear. One is transported and thoroughly engaged. Best of all, Mr. Narayan delivers the heart of a story without the glitter and glare of literary cleverness and intellectual showing-off. The gift is so simply and honestly packaged that one is amazed and gratified by its depth.

"The Financial Expert" takes place in the made-up city of Malgudi in southern India. It centers around the life and pursuits of a man named Margaya who daily sits in a public park and offers expert advice--to those willing to pay for it--on matters of financial import. As you follow along, it seems as if Margaya's life has finally taken a turn for the better, but in reality all is unraveling. The book is rich in imagery of life in India, and one's ease in absorbing these details is due to Mr. Narayan's ability to present the unfamiliar in such a familiar light.

I hope that many more people are lucky enough to discover Mr. Narayan's work.

R.K.Narayan's books offer a wonderfuly detailed and intricate view of the South Indian world,and The Vendor Of Sweets fits into this mould to a T.In this novel,the life of Jagan, the vendor of sweets, and the trials and tribulations of his life are wonderfully captured. What is refreshing, however, is the description of the South Indian way of life that is provided by Narayan--the way Jagan runs his business, the views,opinions he possesses,the fears he entertains.Narayan also vividly portrays the confusions and fears that a person from such a conventional milieu would face when thrown into unconventional situations-- such as having a foreigner for a daughter-in-law, for example. Being a South Indian myself, I can truly appreciate the imagery that his writing evokes, and can also vouchsafe for the fact that it is no easy task to put across to readers whatever he has managed to convey in his books.On the whole,to summarize this review in one sentence:read the book;you will not be disappointed.

The novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-) was born into a Tamil-speaking, Brahmin family. For several years he attended Christian schools in Madras, where he was raised by his grandmother, a devout Hindu who taught him the traditional songs and prayers. His fiction often presents a persona who undergoes a crisis that drives him back in some way to a resolution suffused with an evocation of the Hindu past. Often portrayed as a simple pious Hindu, R. M. Varma, of the University of Jodhpur, more insightfully observes, "Cultural ambivalence is a marked characteristic of Narayan's fictional technique and he hovers between his Hindu faith and lack of it. He merely uses it as a landscape in his fiction."

In his brilliant The Vendor of Sweets (1967), Narayan presents a character named Jagan who owns a small shop that sells sweetmeats. Presented as somewhat of a religious crank, he is a follower of Gandhi who still works his spinning wheel and sits in his shop reading the Bhagavad Gita in between customers. Jagan lives in an idealized traditional India of long ago incongruously conflated with the modern present.

Jagan's only son Mali fully lives in the modern world, not only of India but of America as well. Dropping out of college, as Jagan had as a young man out of misconstrued loyalty to Gandhi, Mali, without consulting with his father, enrolls in a creative writing program in Michigan and helps himself to Jagan's attic stash of rupees in order to pay his expenses. Narayan consistently portrays Mali as a son who has lost all the traditional Hindu virtues while Jagan spoils him and makes excuses for him.

After three years in America Jagan abruptly receives a cable announcing Mali's return with "another person" whom upon arrival at the train station he introduces as his wife, Grace. Jagan suffers a severe shock. His son has not only gone to America, where he in fact does begin to eat beef, but married there without informing his family. Further disoriented because the girl is a Korean-American, Jagan thinks she is Chinese and reflects, "Don't you know that one can't marry a Chinese nowadays? They have invaded our borders. . . ." Having stopped reading the Bhagavad Gita while receiving letters he believed were from Mali in America, but were actually from Grace, Jagan starts reading it "becoming mentally disturbed once again." Narayan subtly dramatizes his reading of the Gita as linked to his disturbed relationship with his son and thereby with modern India. Before long Grace, his new daughter-in-law, begins to take charge of the house and care for Jagan, his wife having died while Mali was in America. Soon she transforms the part of the nineteenth-century house in which she and Mali live with modern Western paintings and furnishings.

In one of the few revealing statements by Mali, "with a gesture of disgust," he says to his father, "Oh, these are not the days of your ancestors. Today we have to compete with advanced countries not only in economics and industry, but also in culture." Satirizing the trash creative writing programs churn out in America, Narayan underscores simultaneously the gulf between father and son, traditional and modern.

Shock upon modern shock rolls over Jagan. His son not only lived unmarried with a foreign woman of mixed descent in his ancestral home but shamelessly concealed it from his father. As Jagan explains to the cousin, "Even my grandfather's brother, who was known to be immoral, never did this sort of thing." His "dirtied" home, "which had remained unsullied for generations, had this new taint to carry." Since all of Jagan's traditional, conventional relations have already "ostracized him" over the "beef-eating Christian girl for a daughter-in-law," Jagan realizes they would "remove themselves further" should they learn of the "latest development." In a significant moment of honesty, Jagan observes he "felt grateful for being an outcast, for it absolved him from obligations as a member of the family." Jagan sits in the dark by the Sir Frederick Lawley statue, a relic from the British past, and meditates on his own arranged marriage in a richly embellished chapter that brilliantly evokes the traditional marriage customs of the joint family system in India and devastatingly insinuates the decayed state of his own house and modern India.

Jagan awakens in the dawn from his night of memories, fantasizing again of entering "a new janma." In regard to the traditional ceremony marking a man turning sixty, the narrator honestly concedes again that Jagan himself "had had his fill of these festivals." In his own way, the narrator frequently intimates, Jagan has picked over and repudiated various customs from the past. So one relative is imagined as saying how could the son Mali be different with "a father like Jagan." Narayan suggests a subtle, logical, and culminating connection of decline between father and son.

The values of the Ramayana and other sacred texts have no resonance for Mali. Jagan, lost and faltering, unable to cope fully with the clash of his traditional values with the modern world, resolves absurdly to retreat across the river, taking his bank book with him, after agreeing to pay for a lawyer for Mali and offering an airline ticket for Grace to return to America: "It's a duty we owe her."

V. S. Naipaul has remarked of Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets that it is "a novel in which his fictional world is cracked open, its fragility finally revealed, and the Hindu equilibrium . . . collapses into something like despair." In his "On Alternative Modernities," Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar has similarly observed, "Everywhere, at every national or cultural site, the struggle with modernity is old and familiar." Narayan has so thoroughly undermined and complicated Jagan with the tensions of twentieth-century life, deep within the structure of the narrative voice itself, only the most shallow or tendentious reading can fail to perceive the scathing critique of both the antedated and bankrupt, traditional and modern, values of India and Western civilization.

Grandmother's Tale was my introduction to Narayan and frankly I have been wondering where he's been all my life. These stories are wonderful. They are the kind of stories that stayed with me for several days after reading them. Narayan brings you to a time and a place with each story. His characters are believable, his stories moving, his writing impecable. Each story is full of humanity. I really enjoyed this collection and look forward to reading more of his work.

The second of a series of novels written by R.K. Narayan, who created an entire fictional city and then filled it, book after book, with its people. Also known as "The English Teacher," in U.S. editions, a young man begins a traditional arranged marriage, but soon loses his wife to illness. As the protagonist attempts to penetrate the border separating life and death, seeking reunification with his wife, and attempts to care for his son, the reader is guided through Narayan's fictional world and into the depths of the hero's heart. Searing but inspiring for any reader facing the loss of a loved one. A masterful transition from Narayan's charming first novel, "Swami and Friends," about a young boy's adventures. Also recommended: "The Guide," ironic comedy about the rise of man who is mistaken for a seer.

As Every other book by R.K.Narayan,this captivates your imagination making you smile about little wonders of life.Very interesting book and I really like the writing style of this author who manages to make you see a simple person,his personality and his life in a small Indian town.Can really identify oneselves in some situations which are both comic and retrospective.

R. K. Narayan has once again proved that he is a master writer. Anybody who wants to know Hindu mythology but doesn't know where to start should buy this book and also R.K.Narayan's other books like 'Ramayana' and 'God, Demons, etc'.

This novel is about a shopkeeper turned tourist guide named Raju. The vivid descriptions of Malgudi help bring the story to life and are certainly a high point of the book. The simple language and the subdued humor make it really enjoyable.

While guiding a researcher to one of the historical spots in Malgudi, Raju falls in love with his wife. Most of the novel describes how Raju is blinded by this affair and loses his bearings in life.

The story takes unpredictable turns frequently, each time pushing Raju further towards destruction. The plot lacks hope in that sense, it is about a person who fails repeatedly. But the ending attempts to depict a transition and is not convincing.

Although a nice book, its certainly not a genius. Its more a narration of a corrupt person's life. It neither conveys a message nor does it attempt to be creative in terms of the plot.

The way Narayan interlaces the two different streams of stories in the book is wonderful. The novel is a masterpiece in the way it is written and takes the reader to a visual tour of malgudi lansscape. The way Narayan has developd the city of malgudi is really exemplery. The transformation of Raju from a high society man to a saint is well laid out. The lives of Raju and Rosy has been well presented. The day to day activities around Raju, the saint's, during fasting is also well presented. The whole episode is dramatised to such an extent that we can visualise the whole thing in front of our eyes. The most importent thing about Narayan is the language that he uses through out the book. Its amazing the way he presents the whole novel in such a simple language. The climax is really heart rendering. Narayan holds the readers interest through out the book. A must read for anyone.

Marvellously written book. Winner of the highest literary award in India, the Sahitya Kala Academy Award, this book makes fascinating reading. Among the few books that I managed to finish on an overnight train journey without being able to put down. I am sure it would be a book that would be reread by all those who have read it once. Charecterisations that Narayan weaves for Rosy and Raju are just brilliant. The high point of the book is I think the transformation of Raju, unaware to himself, into a sort of hermit from the guide at the railway station that he used to be.This has come off so beautifully in the book. Quite worth putting your money into. The book was also made into a highly successful movie by the same name staring Dev Anand. This movie,many may not be aware, was also made in English and had its screenplay written by oscar winning screen writer Pearl Buck.

Certainly Narayan at his best. This book was included in my O'Level course of English Literature. I just could not leave this book. The stories are as close to life as a writer can bring it. Even though the stories are of eastern people the characters are universa

The short stories in Malgudi Days make great light reading. I carry the book with me when I expect to have a couple of minutes to kill. You get instant pleasure since the stories are short.

I love the way Mr. R. K. Narayan paints the picture for you. It is almost like seeing a movie. Also, you never know how the story is going to develop. Sometimes there is no conclusion or ending as such and Mr. Narayan teases you by leaving you wondering. The stories are about simple day-to-day living - no drama, plot, suspense etc. here. But that is what I like about it!

R. K. Narayan is one of those authors who conveys a lot of expressions with a few words, and that is clearly displayed in Malgudi days. Each short story is unique and each character given space. A good book, to say the least.

Writers such as R.K. Narayan, P.G. Wodehouse, write without aspiring for greatness. Like a flower which grows without thinking, their words flow naturally filling page after page with the innate simplicity of life. There are no bones, attached strings or dark clouds with silver linings looming on the horizon. How simple is life!

An extremely funny book that at the same time evokes empathy and makes the heart flow with the milk of human kindness. Certainly not his best writing (Guide, Swami & Friends, The Vendor of Sweets), but definitely recommended.

He is indeed in the top 5 list of all time. Not merely as an Indian author, but very universal, making us realize how similar we all are. I would certainly include his books in the package we send out to the first extra-terrestrial species we spot.It would give them an excellent idea of humanity.

Through his unobtrusive insights, Narayan paints a beautiful picture of a small South Indian town, which is actually a mixture of images derived from his hometown in Kumbakonam District- Tamilnadu and Mysore, Karnataka. Narayan's description of the life of South Indians- their houses, grandmothers, earnest young men, garrulous retired men, street dogs, cricket playing youngsters- makes for a compelling picture, funny and poignant simultaneously.

I cannot recollect the number of times I have read this book - Each time I miss India, all that I need to do is read this book, close my eyes, and recall images from the old tv serial "Malgudi Days"- (immortalized on Indian television). Of course, Malgudi days dealt primarily with Narayan's celebrated "Swami and his friends", but the small town also serves as the backdrop for this semi-autobiographic novel of Narayan.

The English teacher- Krishnan leads a blissful life with his wife and daughter. Life takes a cruel turn when his wife dies of typhoid. The rest of the book deals with Krishnan's struggle, seances through which he communicates with his wife's soul and finally- the magnificent ending of the book, when the author finally realizes the true meaning of life and he experiences "a moment of pure immutable joy; a moment for which one feels grateful to life and death"- The book ends on this note and leaves you with a gentle ache in the heart....

The book is based on Narayan's real life; In his own words, very little of the book is NOT fiction...There are loving references to Susheela- her height (in reality, Narayan's wife was taller than him!), the description of her midnight-blue silk saree, the fragrance of jasmine that enveloped everything associated with her....One can only begin to sense the magnitude of Narayan's loss. Through this book, Narayan has accorded the Indian way of life and his love the greatest possible respect and honor.

Critics have often compared with Russian writer Gogol , his imaginary town of Malgudi , peopled with characters potrayed with a gentle irony as they struggle to accommodate tradition with western attitudes inherited from the British . ' The English Teacher ' , one of his finest works , tells the story of a young man Krishna, just married with a new job . The domestic tenderness of an Indian arranged marriage makes an adventure out of ordinary. Readings of Palgrave's , the outings of the newly married, hagglings over household accounts are endearing images that stay with you forever . The marriage ends in a death, and the way Narayan encompasses this with sadness and loss, simply moves one to tears. What follows then are frustrating attempts to contact his wife through a medium. This book is really a semi-autobiographical account, as narayan himself suffered a bereavement in his married life and in ' My Days ' he decribes his attempts to use a medium. Although other books by Narayan are more popular , namely ,'Swami and his freinds ' and ' Guide ' , it is this book, which , i beleive to be his finest creations. Sadness and humour go hand in hand ,like twins, their shadows inseparable . Like Chekhov all his comedies have a under-tone of sadness. In all his novels , Narayan has never strayed from his Malgudi, making us hear stories under its Banyan tree , taking us for a stroll along Market road , look with awe at those villas in Lawley extension , the cinema , the railway station,the hair-cutting saloon . He has lived in Malgudi all his life , and we , his readers have stayed with him I am waiting to go out of my door into those loved and shabby streetsof malgudiand see with excitement and certainty of pleasure, who, with some unexpected and revealing phrase will open a door on to yet another human existence.