Hali and Collected Stories - Hardcover

G. V. Desani

3.68

19 ratings by Goodreads

9780929701127: Hali and Collected Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0929701127 ISBN 13: 9780929701127

Publisher: McPherson, 1991

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G. V. Desani’s mystical epic Hali and the twenty-three stories collected here deepen and extend a literary vision of unquestioned originality. Hali is a masterpiece of lyrical haunting beauty. It is both a spiritual quest of mythic proportion and the revelation of a personal religion. This magnificent work has long been out of print, and is presented now in its first American edition. The stories which follow reveal the fabulist side of Desani. With satire, irony and winsome comedy, the author takes us on incredible visits into the sacred and profane — the earthy, demonic, and transcendent.

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About the Author:

G. V. Desani, Professor Emiritus of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, was born at Nairobi, Kenya, in 1909. When he was four years old, the family left for Sind, India (later a province of Pakistan), where he was found to be a child prodigy. He first visited England at age 17, staying two years. At the start of World War II in 1939, he returned, became a broadcast journalist, and lectured widely. It was during the war that he wrote All about H. Hatterr, first published in 1949. In 1952, Mr. Desani left London and dedicated the following fourteen years in seclusion to Mantrayoga practice, a lifelong interest. From 1962 to 1967 he was also a special contributor to the Times of India Illustrated Weekly, where he published many stories, book reviews, and a weekly opinion page, "Very High and Very Low." He was invited to the United States in 1968 as a Fulbright Exchange Visitor to teach Buddhist philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin, continuing until his retirement in 1979. His American honors include an invitation from Boston University as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion in the spring of 1981. Mr. Desani died in November of 2000.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Desani, born in Kenya, educated in India and currently a professor at the University of Texas, offers his first book in some 40 years: 23 stories and fables, along with a dramatic prose poem, that range from bleakness to ironic comedy and from supernatural tales to highly mannered satires. The prose poem--which tells the story of ``Hali,'' who loves Rooh, whose death plunges Hali into grief and a mystical journey-- is most noteworthy as an example of private mythology turned into accessible invocation. The supernatural element in many of the other fictions is strong: ``The Valley of Lions,'' for example, is short and visionary; ``Mephisto's Daughter'' concerns a narrator who has access to ``Old Ugly's daughter''; and ``The Lama Arupa'' follows the holy man of the title through ``several states of consciousness'' after his death until he returns as a chicken. ``The Merchant of Kisingarh'' is told by a deceased merchant speaking through his son, a sometime medium. These pieces manage to be both wry and penetrating by turns, while ``The Last Long Letter''--an epistolary tale about a daughter sent away to meet her future groom, a boy who turns out to be visionary--is consistently bittersweet. ``A Border Incident,'' more traditional, tells of a man punished (mildly) for deserting his post to save a boy's life. Desani also offers a mock lecture (``Rudyard Kipling's Evaluation of His Own Mother'') on one of Kipling's more ludicrous compositions, and he closes with the phantasmagoric ``The Mandatory Interview of the Dean''--a madcap satire of bureaucracy and officiousness offered up in a style that is rich and frothily indulgent. A varied collection, impressive in its use of religious and personal mythology--and lushly descriptive of a sensibility and a culture that is part English, part Indian, and uniquely Desani's own. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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