The famous novelist Nirmal Verma has recently been consecrated as the major literary figure in contemporary India, particularly for a famous collection of essays contrasting India and Europe, whereas he had long been deemed interesting only for his very specific literary style but, as for plots and contents a plagiary of Western techniques and world-view. The paper starts with an exploration of the author's music like style, by explaining the contents and formal devices of a short, meta-stylistic sample, then develop its main formal devices, all aiming at creating indeterminacy and indefiniteness, by analyzing some crucial extracts of the novels; the results of these analyses are finally related to the “philosophical' background displayed in Nirmal's essays, by himself in an explicit way, or in a more covert way by a critical reading involving gender theories and theories of culture.
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