Harris Books and Literature Blog

  ( Buy on Amazon ) I haven't liked much of whatever I have read of M T Vasudevan Nair’s fiction so far, except Naalukettu , especially because of its ending, and one of his short stories. And every time I read one of his books, I sincerely hope I would like it. However, it's only now that I’ve found a novel by him I can honestly say I love and admire. This book Manju (Mist) is different from most of his other works; the story doesn't take place in Kerala but in an exotic Nainital, and perhaps this is his only novel with a female protagonist. It’s not a novel, but a novella with sixty-odd pages and is sweet like a little melancholic poem. Vimala is a boarding school resident teacher in Nainital who stays in the school quarters even during the summer vacation when all the students and staff leave for home. She hardly visits her family. It's the end of winter and the start of the tourist season where Vimala sometimes talks to the boy known as 'Buddhu' who operate...

                                                                       Delhi: A Soliloquy (Malayalam) Delhi Gathakal  portrays the lives of ordinary people in Delhi beset with the turmoil of Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars and their aftermath, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots. The novel progresses through the stories of a bunch of protagonists, especially Malayalis living in Delhi from the early 1960s to the present. The work is important in that it records, using the tools of fiction, a certain period in the history of a particular region. However, a major disappointment was that the narration was purely linear following a traditional storytelling style and hardly using any modern techniques of fiction. The novel is almost entirely set in Delhi and hence replete with...