A Small Town Narcissus
Ka Naa Subramanyam
CONFESSION OF A LOVER by Mulk Raj Anand Arnold-Heinemann, 1976, 404 pp., 50.00
July 1976, volume 1, No 3

Mulk Raj Anand is one of the pioneers of the modern Indo-Anglian novel. Since his first novels were written and published abroad he has added to his reputation as a humanist, as an art critic, as a committee man who has served in various capaci­ties and as one known to people who are worth being known to.

There is an ambiguity about his reputation as a novelist that has puzzled me. There are those who think of him as a great novelist who has been add­ing to his stature with every new novel he writes; there are those who think of him as having done the best work he was capable of with his first books and who has been living on that reputation adding nothing substantially. There are those who think of him as being on the bandwagon of progressives, without any remarkable achievements to his credit; there are those who think of him as largely a huma­nist who sometimes uses the novel form to inflict his ideas, if not ideologies, on the unwary reader.

Continue reading this review