The Train That Had Wings

"M. Mukundan is easily one of the finest story-tellers in India today. He has learnt his narrative art as much from Salinger, Calvino, Borges, and Marquez as from Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagar, Vikramaditya Tales, and the Jatakas and combines the magic of both in his short stories. This meticulous choice of stories from Mukundan in a sensitive translation by Donald R. Davis Jr. reflects the range and variety of this Malayalam author's thematic concerns and philosophical preoccupations that have their roots in the moods and moors of the 1960s and 1970s where existentialism and political radicalism had their heyday in Indian life and letters, of anonymity and identity, of claustrophobia and morbidity, of the dehumanizing hegemony of the encounters of different worlds and different states of being, of cruelty, sin, indifference, and death. The stories are full of intense narrative moments, of the dark drama of the soul, of emotions in the raw, of the irrational that suddenly erupts into our otherwise drab and humdrum lives. Mukundan's ways of transcending commonsense and breaking the barrier of conventional realism are a fascinating as his racy language and cryptic expressions, his translucent expositions and polysemic denouements.
-K. Satchidanandan, Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, poet, editor, and author of Imperfect and Other New Poems.