SOURCE: "A review of A Horse and Two Goats," in The New York Times Book Review, January 25, 1970, p. 5.

Below, Lafore argues that the unifying theme of Narayan's stories is the failure of people to communicate with one another.

This is a collection of short stories, the first to be published in the United States, by the distinguished Indian novelist R. K. Narayan. Like his novels, they deal (with the exception of the title story) with life in the city of Malgudi, which is Mr. Narayan's Yoknapatawpha County. They are all very specifically Indian, richly adorned with picturesque native customs and vivid local color, so that the casual reader with a limited appetite for folklore might well form the misleading impression that this is all they are. He might also be misled by their brevity and simplicity into supposing that they belong in the category of Theophrastian vignettes.

They...