V.S. Naipaul's analysis, in his book India: a Wounded Civilization, of this short comic novel as typically Hindu in its outlook was what prompted me to finally read my first R.K. Narayan. I found Mr Sampath — The Printer of Malgudi surprising and rather charming. We follow Srinivas, an unworldly 37 year-old with a wife and son, as he tries to make something of his life by setting up a one-man weekly journal of political, social and artistic comment. The title character, who is the only printer in Malgudi willing to take on such politically sensitive work, is introduced early on, but we don't get his name or the circumstances of their meeting until chapter 4, a third of the way through the book. So although the larger than life, boundlessly ambitious and optimistic Sampath is the main character, he's not the point-of-view character, which makes for an interesting dynamic as the odd-couple relationship of him and Srinivas develops. Then at the halfway point, when the journal is forced to close due to a wildcat strike by Sampath's workers and he ropes Srinivas into scripting an epic film based on a Hindu legend, film-industry chaos and farce quickly ensues. It's a strangely comforting novel about muddling through, or, as Naipaul picks up on, about how life's eddies, no matter how energetically navigated, tend not to any great end but to the same backwaters we started in.