Reviews for Selected Short Stories

The average rating for Selected Short Stories based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-28 00:00:00 Monnier Franck The prose of Tagore is mesmerizing which makes you feel enchanted; and often gives you a dose of refreshment. Its beauty lies in the profound insights conveyed in very simple words. Nearly all the stories touch you somewhere deep but it was the story 'Cabulliwalah' that was quite moving for me.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-20 00:00:00 Jason Butler I found this an engaging and lively collection of short stories, I had never read Tagore before, I knew he had won the Nobel prize, and I had the feeling that he was more renowned for his poetry, these stories though felt vital and fresh despite being over a hundred years old, perhaps because they are strongly character driven. Most of the stories began with him introducing one or two characters and unfold through their interactions, the time and the place of the setting mostly Bengal in the 1890s did not feel to be hugely significant and despite (or maybe because) his opposition to British occupation and empire the British seemed to me mostly evident though their absence, his rural Bengal is possibly timeless or slightly removed from the pace of the 1890s in some ways, a few stories take place in Kolkata but mostly they are in the countryside and deal with village life where the big news is about relations between landlord and tenant, fathers and sons, mothers in law and daughters in law. The stories tend to be political rather than Political, touching on social and economic issues - child marriage, dowries, inheritance, at the time Tagore was writing these stories he was running the families ancestral estates, and reading these tales I could imagine him doing a lot of listening, hearing the stories that people told and the problems that were on their minds, I did not get the feeling that he was much inspired by the landscape or by his family roots. In this collection there are thirty stories over 263 or so pages, I do not have enough fingers and toes to work out the average length, but none of these stories is particularly long, Tagore is frequently ironic, my smile to page ratio was pretty good, I am familiar with short stories having a twist at the end but Tagore seemed to prefer a snap -a sudden death or disappearance as though human nature meant that there might be thesis and antithesis, but that synthesis is too much to expect in human life. Thee was a huge variety of stories, realistic ones dealing with social issues, to the supernatural. Dignity I felt was the most common theme, human dignity, the struggle of an individual to assert or maintain dignity, to how dignity is bruised, damaged or denied through a variety of inequalities.