Malgudi Days
Narayan's fictional South Indian town of Malgudi is one of literature's great invented places. These stories of ordinary Indian life, told with gentle irony and deep humanity, are among the finest examples of the form from South Asia.
Caste is the complaint that carries the most weight against this collection: readers note it's almost entirely populated by upper-caste Brahmin characters, and that the hierarchy goes unexamined rather than questioned, one noting flatly it “largely deals with the lives of upper caste Brahmins” and that Narayan “never sees a low caste person.” Endings are the other sore spot: readers describe finishing a story and feeling shortchanged, one calling it “such an abrupt ending that I regretted,” another saying the “ending of three stories seemed to me awkward.” A detail-oriented reader sorted the roughly 32 stories into tiers and dropped about a third into a mediocre-filler bucket next to the strong entries, and the story Iswaran gets flagged for an ending that reads as confusing rather than deliberately open.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
