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R.K. Narayan was born in Madras, South India, in 1906, and educated there and at Maharaja's College in Mysore. His first novel, Swami and Friends and its successor, The Bachelor of Arts, are both set in the enchanting fictional territory of Malgudi and are only two out of the twelve novels he based there. In 1958 Narayan's work The Guide won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his country's highest literary honor. In addition to his novels, Narayan has authored five collections of short stories, including A Horse and Two Goats, Malguidi Days, and Under the Banyan Tree, two travel books, two volumes of essays, a volume of memoirs, and the re-told legends Gods, Demons and Others, The Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. In 1980 he was awarded the A.C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and in 1982 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Narayan died in 2001.
R. K. Narayan entered the American scene with his Financial Expert, a businesslike title that concealed a book of outwardly simple but profound humor, rooted in Hinduism and Indian culture. The present novel is the tenth set in Malgudi and introduces yet another engaging hero, a man beset and beseiged by the younger generation and the transplanted (and transformed) ways of the West. (Narayan, with his perceptive expression in a folk mosaic, has been spoken of for the Nobel Prize.) Jagan is, as his son Mall disdainfully puts it, a vendor of sweets, and Mali will have none of it. Mali manages to get to America, where he is supposedly learning how to write, but he returns to his home with a girl, Grace, and a story-writing machine in which, he wishes his father to invest. Jagan balks employing the non-violent non-cooperation his master, Gandhi, had used so successfully before him, and after disrupting the sweetmeat business all over town with his lowered prices, retreats happily into a garden where he may meditate the rest of his days, leaving his house and business, to his still struggling son. Old and new, old and young, are juxtaposed in this gently derisive yet tender novel, provincial in situation, universal in application. For that special taste. (Kirkus Reviews)
