SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Tales from the Narmada Woods.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 13 (15 July 1993): 36.

In the following review, Annan discusses the depth of emotion in the six varied story stories that comprise A River Sutra.

A River Sutra consists of six tales that make up a fictionalized primer on Indian attitudes to religion, love, music, and poetry. An entry in the glossary explains the word sutra:

Literally, a thread or string. Also, a term for literary forms, usually aphoristic in nature.

What this particular sutra strings together, though, are not so much aphorisms as parables. They are as easy-to-read, unanalytical, and, in some cases, as violent as the ones in the New Testament—or the tales of Scheherazade, for that matter. This gives them an antique patina in piquant contrast to the jeeps, sound recorders, air conditioning, and relics from a later period of antiquity—like a...