‘A Continually Melting Vision’
Rosinka Chaudhuri
AN OMNIBUS EDITION OF R.K. NARAYAN (VOLS. I & II) by Alexander McCall Smith Everyman's Library, 2007, 619 pp., £10.99 each
February 2007, volume 31, No 2

The line separating Narayan’s world from the world of Narayan’s fiction has always been a blurred one, and the viewer trying to distinguish between the two will tend to suffer from what Narayan himself inimitably called, in the autobiographical context of his tangential glimpses of his wife-to-be at the street tap, ‘a continually melting vision.’ The man himself, his extended family, immediate family, neighbours, friends and passers-by, all feature in what used to be called ‘starring roles’ in his various books of fiction and non-fiction; even more perplexingly sublime are the slippages between the language in which the novelist writes, and the manner in which his characters speak.

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