At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai (Introduction)

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR: 17 short stories “about belonging, desire, and the boundaries of love” from “one of the 20th century’s great female writers”—with a foreword by Anita Desai (Washington Post).

“Jhabvala has Alice Munro’s gift for making you feel you’re reading a novel in miniature.” —Seattle Times

Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures—European, post–Independence Indian, and American—is never more acute.

In “A Course of English Studies,” a young woman arrives at Oxford from India and struggles to adapt, not only to the sad, stoic object of her infatuation, but also to a country that seems so resistant to passion and color. In the wrenching “Expiation,” the blind, unconditional love of a cloth shop owner for his wastrel younger brother exposes the tragic beauty and foolishness of human compassion and faith. The wry and triumphant “Pagans” brings us middle–aged sisters Brigitte and Frankie in Los Angeles, who discover a youthful sexuality in the company of the languid and handsome young Indian, Shoki. This collection also includes Jhabvala’s last story, “The Judge’s Will,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2013 after her death.

The profound inner experience of both men and women is at the center of Jhabvala’s writing: she rivals Jane Austen with her impeccable powers of observation. With an introduction by her friend, the writer Anita Desai, At the End of the Century celebrates a writer’s astonishing lifetime gift for language, and leaves us with no doubt of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s unique place in modern literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640091382
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	23,844
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the author of nineteen books. She is the recipient of Booker Prize, a MacArthur fellowship, and has been honored with an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Jhabvala's screenplays for Merchant–Ivory Productions have earned two Academy Awards. Jhabvala and her husband divide their time between Delhi and New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Anita Desai
A Loss of Faith
The Widow
A Spiritual Call
Miss Sahib
A Course of English Studies
An Experience of India
Two More under the Indian Sun
Desecration
Expiation
Great Expectations
Two Muses
Menage
A Choice of Heritage
A Lovesong for India
Pagans
At the End of the Century
The Judge's Will

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/15/2018
Jhabvala (1927–2013) is perhaps best known for collaborating with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant on their Oscar-winning films, but the German-born author also won the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975. This collection, which carries an introduction by novelist Anita Desai, offers 17 stories dating from 1963 to 2013. Jhabvala is renowned for her tales of life in India, but this collection also includes stories set in Europe and America. The characters in these "Western" pieces are mostly upper-class, artistic types in places such as New York and Los Angeles who seem pallid and interchangeable next to her more memorable Indian characters. The Indians portrayed in such stories as "Expiation" and "The Widow" are unforgettable. Jhabvala is especially observant on the lives of Westerners in India. Like Paul Scott in The Raj Quartet, Jhavbala reveals how certain Britons living in India slowly become unhinged owing to culture shock. Impressionable young women fall under the spell of a swami or, as in "An Experience of India," just fall apart. VERDICT Essential reading for anyone who enjoys fiction about India, especially when the stories come from the pen of a master.—Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Library Journal

[This] posthumous new collection of selected short fiction…showcases [Jhabvala's] darker cadences. The stories—all of them elegantly plotted and unsentimental, with an addictive, told-over-tea quality—are largely character studies of people isolated, often tragically, by custom or self-delusion…If her stories have fallen slightly out of fashion, it may be in some part because of [her] resistance to the soul laid bare. Her characters have little interiority or agency; the fates they run up against tend to feel inexorable, especially in her later stories, in which the ironic distance cools into cynicism…Jhabvala's stories are also, of course, unfashionable for another reason: their unabashed ventriloquizing of another culture, an inhabiting of India and Indians that a contemporary author might take pains to artistically justify, all the more so now that our bookshelves are filled with Indian authors writing in English. But this is what surely gives Jhabvala's work its rare gleam: the undeceived clarity of the eternal outsider, immersed yet apart.

The New York Times Book Review - Megan O'Grady

Praise for At the End of the Century

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Beautifully curated selection of some of her most celebrated writing . . . The questions her stories raise—about belonging, desire and the boundaries of love—feel as contemporary as great literature always does . . . This posthumous collection is a wonderful reintroduction to one of the 20th century’s great female writers and a deliciously intersectional and thoughtful passage to her India." —Bilal Qureshi, The Washington Post

"At the End of the Century gathers seventeen stories, dating from Jhabvala’s first collection, in 1963, to 'The Judge’s Will,' published in this magazine two weeks before her death. They invite a face–to–face meeting with a literary figure who deserves to be reckoned with on her own terms . . . Anita Desai notes in the introduction to this collection that it was Jhabvala’s 'fate to be presented to Western readers as a Jane Austen.' Jhabvala’s prose does share Austen’s acerbic wit and a well–cadenced fluency, confident in the strength of syntax to sustain explication—and comedy—without flashy language." —Maya Jasanoff, The New Yorker

"The stories—all of them elegantly plotted and unsentimental, with an addictive, told–over–tea quality—are largely character studies of people isolated, often tragically, by custom or self–delusion . . . Vivid, unsparing portraits are leavened with the kind of humanizing moments that evoke a total world within their compression." —Megan O’Grady, The New York Times Book Review

"At the End of the Century provides a good starting point for anyone wishing to dip into Jhabvala’s oeuvre, and it stands on its own in its grappling with issues of love, family, white savior complexes and postcolonialism." —Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Times

"To read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is to regard the human heart through a magnifying glass . . . The 17 stories gathered in At the End of the Century are no exception, taking an intimate look at the complex modus operandi of love between siblings, paramours, and strangers . . . The elegant, clear–eyed fiction Jhabvala left behind shows us the very things her characters can’t—or choose not to—perceive: Love is a power dynamic, and it’s rarely diplomatic." —Claire Luchette, O, The Oprah Magazine

"At the End of the Century packages the writer for a new audience, in a new time . . . Jhabvala writes how people talk, or how people used to talk. Her stories bespeak a slice of time during which people could both interact with others quite unlike them and talk with the expectation of privacy with people quite like them: a world post–Wright brothers, pre–internet." —Mallika Rao, The Atlantic

"A new selection of stories from Jhabvala (1927–2013) that offers plentiful reasons to celebrate her brilliance . . . Jhabvala has Alice Munro’s gift for making you feel you’re reading a novel in miniature as she distills to their essence broad expanses of geography, personal history and time . . . The results are captivating." —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"These stories show the same elegance that marked Jhabvala's film collaborations with producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory. At the End of the Century is a treasure for readers who savor quiet works of fiction and a fitting tribute to one of the most perceptive and sensitive writers of the 20th century." —Houston Chronicle

"The collection is mammoth in scope . . . In their own way, each story furnishes the emotional scope of a novel and encapsulates lives in their entirety." —Rachel Aydt, The Brooklyn Rail

"A vital voice of the 20th century, and often considered Austen–esque in her writing, this collection is a collectible." —Sana Goyal, HuffPost India

"Jhabvala was an absolute gift to the world." —Bustle

"A career–spanning collection of stories about the collision of East and West . . . Compelling in their elegance and for Jhabvala's poised, precise eye, which stays consistent and steady through the decades." —Kirkus Reviews

"A young German Jewish refugee in England in the 1940s, a resident of India for two dozen years, and a New Yorker from the mid–1970s until her death in 2013, Jhabvala triangulated her three adopted cultures in the 17 enthralling stories gathered in this sterling retrospective collection. This triad is also explored in the many startling ménage–à–trois variations she dramatizes with lyric sensitivity and steely irony . . . Jhabvala was a spellbinding short story writer of fluid empathy, exceptional cross–cultural insight, and abiding respect for unconventional love . . . This is a richly captivating, revelatory, and important collection." —Booklist (starred review)

"A magnificent selection of the Booker winner's short stories . . . A richly enjoyable reminder of Jhabvala's keenly observant talent." —Sunday Times (UK)

"The 17 stories in At The End of the Century . . . chronicle Jhabvala's concern with cultural encounters, dislocation and the immigrant experience. Misogyny – and sensuality – bubble up through impeccably constructed pros." —New Statesman (UK)

"The laser–sharp intelligence of award–winning novelist and short story writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is etched into these 17 compelling tales." —Anita Sethi, Observer (UK)

From the Publisher

A large cast of talented narrators was well chosen to give voice to this excellent collection of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s subtle and multilayered short stories. The production begins with an informative introduction by writer Anita Desai. The narrators suit the stories they narrate, settling us in place, be it in a Delhi shopkeeper’s orderly store or on Los Angeles’s sun-drenched streets. Winner of the Booker Prize, Jhabvala, who died in 2013, was also an Oscar-winning screenwriter for many James Ivory and Ismail Merchant films, including A ROOM WITH A VIEW. These tender, fierce, clear-eyed stories touch on life’s unexpected pains and joys, and on the vagaries of the human heart faced by her Indian, English, and American characters. They are to be savored. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

2018-09-18

A career-spanning collection of stories about the collision of East and West.

When Jhabvala (A Lovesong for India, 2012, etc.) died in 2013, she left behind a prodigious body of work that had garnered her a Booker Prize for Heat and Dust (1975) and Oscars for co-writing the screenplays to A Room with a View and Howards End. Born in Germany, educated in England, and married for more than 50 years to an Indian architect, Jhabvala described herself as a perpetual refugee, moving for much of her later life between New York's Upper East Side and India. The 17 short stories in this collection take us from the early 1960s through 2013, though in a way they all feel as if they belong to an earlier time: Westerners, bored with their imploding lives, latch on to the perceived exoticism of India. In one story, two rich sisters (one married to a pompous American businessman, the other sleeping with him) become infatuated with a young Indian screenwriter ("Pagans"). In another, an English secretary heads to India to devote herself to assisting a guru despite the fact that she has competition for his attention from a brash German devotee ("A Spiritual Call"). Sometimes, Jhabvala switches the dynamics, as when a wealthy Indian college student begins a disastrous affair with a mousy English lecturer ("A Course of English Studies"). Whatever the premise, Jhabvala is interested in binaries; poverty plays a foil to wealth, India to Europe, age to youth, family to the individual. Even more, she wants to explore the ways that characters are shaken out of their familiar lives by "too much and too violent a humanity."

Despite the old-fashioned milieu these stories move in, they are compelling in their elegance and for Jhabvala's poised, precise eye, which stays consistent and steady through the decades.

Kirkus Reviews