Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894–1950)

Though his name may be unfamiliar, this Bengali writer (died 1950) wrote the book that inspired one of the great classics of world cinema: Pather Panchali. He is one of my favorite authors and I have read many of his novels and many of his stories; this is yet another story collection. This selection of eight (out of several hundred) stories is generally well-translated and is a good introduction to the writer. The brilliance of his stories lies at once in his focus on people discovering their destinies amid their own complicated circumstances as well as for the feeling of intimacy he evokes even his manner of telling the stories is familiar, comfortable, and perhaps even a little rambling. Bandyopadhyay has a gift for expressing the landscape as well as an empathy for his characters even as he wrote about both rural and urban subjects. His narrative is notable for its ability to express the views of different characters honestly and sympathetically, and there is a pervading gentle-ness about his language. There is, too, among them, a persistence, a recalcitrance — a stubborn humanity — that makes them all recognizable. They are not all likeable, they are not all good people, but they are all deeply human in a way that seems all too rare in literature.… (mehr)