It has been hailed as a wonderful piece of fiction which employs philosophy, theology and logic in the building up of its narrative. As I started the first pages, I was reminded of Mann’s Magic Mountain and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. As the author remarks in his post script the reader who doesn’t contemplate the first…
Mark Twain’s. The Prince and the Pauper is an old tale of two people who look alike and change places, to experience life in both the worlds. Here it is King Edward VIII and Tom Canty, the pauper who swap places. The king in his sojourn into the world of his subjects is informed harshly…
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende is a novel which spans four generations of the Del Valle family, starting from Nivea, to Clara, to Blanca and Alba. Taking us through momentous events in the history of the world and the country at the turn of the 20th century and afterwards, the novel chronicles…
Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’ must have been a fascinating triumph when it was first published. The misery and the pathos of the situation, the general human predicament, the condemnation that always haunts the damned, the unflinching belief of one man in love and sacrifice, and the unswerving devotion of one man towards his duty are…
Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘The Professor’ is a simple and steady novel about the life of Mr. William Crimsworth, a young man from an aristocratic family with no reliable connections or fortune. He is left to find his way in life. Although of not a very handsome nature, and endowed only with simple and plain features,…
Uncle Tom is a wonderful sketch for two reasons;The way Tom liberates his soul from his body, and lets them know they can maul and mutilate his body, but they cannot touch his soul, And then the way he refuses to stoop down to wickedness and incurs the wrath of his master Simon Legree. The…
From the novels written by Indian writers, I have planned a small detour to desribe three novels which I had the opportunity of reading. All the three novels are from the East and each of them has valuable insights into the art of writing fiction. Red Sorghum Red Sorghum is an intense novel from China…
E.M.Forster’s novel ‘A Passage to India’ narrates the social and political condition of the days of the British Raj and the relation between the colonial masters and their Indian subjects. The relationship was strained and fragile. The novel presents the fractious and mistrustful sentiment that permeated this unequal relation and even gestures or attitudes which…
Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfel Hall is unlike any novel that I have read so far. Not getting into the details of the story which was considered far too liberal or immoral for those times, I shall touch upon the power of the novel for presenting two remarkable characters in Mr. Arthur Huntingdon and…
Reading a novel can be a weighty matter especially when the novelist looks at the more serious side of life. Expecting an instance of light hearted fun and comedy in a novel like ‘The Rainbow’ would be a misjudgment since the novel’s energy and force are vital to propel the characters ahead in a spiritual…