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Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. Poovan Banana and Other Stories. V. Abdulla, tr. Hyderabad. Disha (Orient Longman, distr.). 1994. 218 pages. Rs105. ISBN 81-2500-323-1.
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer(1908-94) was the first major writer to emerge from the Muslim community of Kerala. He was also a pioneer of the Progressive Literary Movement of the thirties and forties in Malayalam. However, his complex and varied fictional world defies categorization along communal or ideological lines. He is an inimitable storyteller who transforms the mundane into the magical with his transparent, intimate, and ironic style informed by a rare humanist vision.
Poovan Banana and Other Stories brings together sixteen of Basheer's well-known stories, of which two are, in fact, short novels. These two had earlier appeared under the title Voices/The Walls (1976), while the remaining stories (except "The Gold Ring") had been published earlier in a volume titled The...