Somewhere deep inside all the Russian writers must have been philosophers and thinkers. There is no other Literature which looks so much at the society with such concern, angst and emotion. Let there be no doubt that it was not only intensely engaging with the questions of the outward reality, but also very inward looking….
The other day I went to kovvur. It was an opportunity to see the river Godavari again. I contemplated about the river on the same lines that Huck Finn does in the novel “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Huck sees the Mississippi as awesome, grand and still. Perhaps there is a language that unites the rivers.
Imagine a place called Malgudi and whatever feature you want to give to this happy town, has already been done by the renowned writer RK Narayan. It is said that people search the map of India to find this imaginary place which is so fondly and quaintly visualized by the novelist in most of his…
All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. Shakespeare has long ago resolved this question about the relation between life and drama. Drama has laid the foundation for the evolution of other genres of Literature like the novel or the short story. In the days before the invention of printing,…
Is there a distinction that one can make with certainty? Literature is generally what has stood the test of time and can appeal to a number of people because of its inherent greatness, that transcends region, language, culture or genre. The great epic poems of the world, the great tragedies of Shakespeare, the novels of…
The Rainbow is a wonderful novel. The novel portrays the life of three generations of Brangwens. Tom Brangwen, the farmer of Cossethay, who marries Lydia Lensky; the Polish widow, Anna Brangwen, the daughter of Lydia Lensky, who marries Will Brangwen and Ursula Brangwen, the first child of Anna and Will Brangwen. The novel is wondrous…
Hamlet by Shakespeare When I read Hamlet or when it was taught to us, I was not moved by any overwhelming feeling. But when I watched the celluloid version (Hamlet played by Lawrence Olivier) I was overwhelmed by the ringing resonance of Shakespeare’s diction and by the powerful presence of a noble human being fitted…
The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is one example of stark animal imagery. A group of British boys stranded on an island start showing a tendency of extremely feral behavior in their struggle for survival, and revert to the primitive state of human kind when life was lawless and only might was…
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an entrancing novel. It is about the virtuosity and genuineness of Mark Twain’s experience of the Mississippi, the richness of the language, the honesty of the characters and the expansiveness of the novel itself. Huck Finn’s rejection of civilization, his yearning for paternal love, the kindness of Ole Jim…
Ranking works of art is always a difficult task and novels is not exempted since everyone has his or her favorites. My list will be Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, I Claudius by Robert Graves, To Kill a…