HOW I BECAME A HOLY MOTHER And Other Stories.

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Set, of course in India, these stories are concerned not so much with Europeans in India as with Indians themselves. They are about universal human passionsâ yet interwoven with India itself. The heat, the vastness, the loneliness of India are all reflected in the lives of the people living in a country that is not so much an additional character as, often, the most central one. As always she tells her tales with compassion, penetration, humor, and the blithe gift of narration familiar to the hundreds of thousands who have seen the she scripted for the legendary Merchant Ivory teamâ such as Howards End, The Remains of the Day, A Room with a View, and her own Heat and Dustâ and who have delighted in her novels.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, India

218 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1979

About the author

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a British and American novelist and screenwriter. She is best known for her collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.
In 1951, she married Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala and moved to New Delhi. She began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Diplomatic Service and Overseas List of the 1998 New Years Honours and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.

Reviews

[Ava · Rating 3 out of 5]

some stories were relatively touching or impactful, the rest were not. good prose, but rating solidified when a guy in a swedish coffee shop asked if i would recommend it and i could not.

[Christiane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these stories are more like vignettes than short stories with a plot and a denouement. They are well-written, subtle, often finely humorous, and her characters - Indian as well as Westerners living in India - are minutely observed and real.

And yet, for me there is always something missing in Ms Jhabvala's work, some spark jumping over. They are somehow too cool and detached for my taste and even the saddest and most tragic events don't move me as much as other writers' books and stories set in India.

[Clara Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb storytelling from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - a collection of short stories that will take you on a journey of Indian life in all its beauty, scent, music, warmth, and flavor. The book has a total of 16 stories in 363 pages.

[Mira Desai · Rating 5 out of 5]

You need forbearance to read this one. It tells of India as it is, warts and divine whatchacallit and all...puts the knife in, and turns it.

Excellent writing if you can live with the fact that we have NO redeeming qualities.

Read this for the atmosphere she's casually, oh-so-easily built up. Stories about the people you see all around.

Yes, you need forbearance to read this one.