Tuesday, June 16

Few Great Novels For Reading

The Alchemist



A beautiful novel with no names for the characters. It is the story of a young Shepard who start out chasing him dream to discover the treasure. The novel repeatedly urges "If one decides to chase his dream the entire world will conspire in helping to make him achieve it". The Spanish boy sets out to the Egyptian coast after selling his herd and crosses the desert towards the pyramids. The adventures along the desert route is well narrated and depicted as real. 
Moreover the book has nothing obscene and could be recommended as a good read for any age. 

The Good Earth – Pearl S Buck



This novel narrates the story of an enthusiastic and hardworking peasant named Wang Lung. The hard works he and his wife put in farming the land ultimately makes them rich and prosperous.

Wang Lung’s father also a wise farmer gives him correct advices especially at the time of selecting women as wife. Wang Lung wanted his wife to be beautiful, but the old father questions him – ‘What will we do with a pretty woman?’.

Wang Lung accepts a young woman slave named O- lan from the local landlord as wife. Though she was not any good-looking, was intelligent and equally hardworking as her husband.

Wang Lung and O lan go through several hardships in life, but overcomes all odds with the hard works they put in on land. Many times O lan surprises Wang Lung with her intelligence and pragmatic solutions. Gradually they get wealthier and richer.

Towards the end, the riches slightly change the habits of Wang Lung but not his love for land and the earth that gave him everything. This is evident when he overhears a discussion between his sons. In the last chapter, his two sons can be seen discussing about selling the land and investing the money in shipping and rice trade. The moment Wang Lung hears this; he burst into tears and pleads with his sons not sell the land.

The Good Earth won Pulitzer Prize. The novel was translated into over thirty languages.

Pearl S Buck was born in 26 June 1892, and spent her childhood in China. Her other novels are East Wind, West Wind, A House Divided, Dragon Seed, The Time is Noon. She was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude
- by Gabriel Garcia Marquez




The novel narrates the history of Bundias family. The reader gets an experience that almost makes it impossible to distinguish between reality and fantasy.


Adujeevitham - by Benyamin



This is the story of a poor Muslim youth from rural Kerala going to a gulf country in search of better job and prospects. In Kerala he `lived as a very friendly villager with the neighborhood and had immense freedom as a free bird. The situations when he reached his dream land were exactly opposite to his experiences in home country village. There he had to live in bondage under hostile employers who denied him even his primary needs.

The author is successful in narrating the incidents happened as if he himself had experienced and gone through every bit of it. Gulf countries are seen as a dream land by many youngsters in Kerala. But the attitudes of the Arabs towards them are not always amicable. Here he was a slave by all means in a goat farm. And for several years he could see the outside place or contact others.

The bitter experiences are extremely touching and how he escapes is also breathtaking. Author for some reason presents him as an optimistic and staunch believer of God. But, at the end few good people and the government of India comes to rescue bringing him to peace and home where his wife and son was waiting all these years without even knowing anything about him.

The entire experiences can be coined to a single proverb in Malayalam – ‘Akkarapachha’. Meaning that we have great regards for foreign land; blindly tend to imitate their customs forgetting the greatness and blessings of home land.