Selected Stories (Modern Classics)

"There were moments when I wished nothing more than to turn into a human bomb and explode for the glory of the freedom of India," says the young, idealistic narrator in the last of the stories in this anthology. Two pages (and half-a-life) later a fraternal revolutionary reflects on their extremism, "You can be virtuous without having your head shaved, without donning saffron robes or covering yourself with ash". Saadat Manto (1912-55) is renowned for his - still occasionally shocking - short stories set against the horrors of the partition riots. Not that he's a documentarian (there's a story set in 'Bollywood' here, too). Manto is actually a writer in the old tradition, baiting the reader's curiosity with themes of love, lust and adolescent vulnerability as he deftly leads them through a tracery of symbols and psychological gestures. Khalid Hasan's translation reverently opts to stretch English ears to fit the Urdu mouth, with the result that there's nothing here to suggests why Manto has been compared to stylists like Nabokov. What you get is a writer coolly focused on the way that individual behaviour both shapes society and is shaped by it. Gregarious and completely - indeed enviably - free of censoriousness, it's easy to see why Manto continues to be esteemed.

A good collection of stories. This book took a while to arrive but the wait was worth it.