Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Wuthering Heights is so full of violent passions that it is hard to imagine a nineteenth-century young woman as its author. Emily Bronte died in 1848 at the age of 30. She was a shy and reclusive woman without any friends. Yet she created two of the most ruthlessly passionate characters in the whole literature ever: Heathcliff and Catherine. Wuthering Heights is a novel with a difference and should be read just for that one reason alone. Literary critic Elizabeth Drew describes Catherine and Heathcliff as “creatures of the wild moorland existence beside which conventional standards are meaningless.” Their untameable passion spills out of the book darkening the entire moorland of their existence. Catherine is the daughter of Earnshaw, a squire in the eighteenth-century Yorkshire. Earnshaw has a son too: Hindley. Heathcliff comes into the family as a foundling and supplants Hindley in the affections of both the bland squire and his energetic daughter. The squire does not

The human world is darkly comical. The twenty-first century has only added more sound and fury to the comedy. D B C Pierre’s novel, Vernon God Little , gives us all that dark humour on a platter. As Vernon is going to turn 16, he is arrested for complicity in a serial killing which his friend Jesus Navarro committed. Jesus could not endure the bullying any further and he pulled the trigger on sixteen of his fellow students before killing himself. The novel tells the story of the investigation. How people react to Vernon’s arrest and related events bring out the hollowness of their thoughts and feelings. Vernon’s mother, Doris, is more worried about the fridge that she has been waiting for though she does console her son saying that mothers love their sons even if the sons are murderers. She is in no hurry to believe her son’s assertion of his innocence. Soon she develops an affair with Eulalio Ledesma, who claims to be a TV reporter, though he is in fact a TV repairman t

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another).” In fact, the Bible in the wrong hand can be diabolic. You can claim to own all the truths while drowning in a deluge of lies and forgeries. Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird teaches us that and many other great lessons of life. “It is a sin to kill a mockingbird,” says the novel. Mockingbirds are innocent and harmless. Innocence should be preserved, not destroyed. Yet goodness is always under threat from evil in the human world. This is what the novel shows. Tom Robinson is a black American in Maycomb. He is accused of raping Mayella, daughter of Bob Ewell who is nothing more than a drunkard with too many children. Actually Mayella asked Tom into the house under the pretext of helping with some repair. When she tried to seduce him, Bob Ewell entered and he beat up his daughter for what she did. He then accused Tom of molesting Mayella. Because Bob was white and To

Every spiritual quest is ultimately a quest for meaning. Most people are contented with readymade meanings provided by religions because personal quests are arduous and even hazardous. Religions and other readymade meanings fail to make sense to some people and such people have to undertake the torturous path themselves. Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha , tells the story of one such quest. Siddhartha is a young Brahmin of ancient India who is not contented with the truths and meanings given by his religion. He happens to listen to the Samanas (wandering ascetics) and chooses to join them. His friend Govinda too joins him. From the ascetics he learns to liberate the self from its traditional trappings like family, property and sensuality. But Siddhartha is still discontented. Self-denial is not enlightenment , he learns. Both Siddhartha and his friend Govinda leave the ascetics after they listen to Gotama Buddha’s teachings about the Eightfold Path for enlightenment. The

A warning before we start: Albert Camus’s The Rebel is not a work of fiction; it is a philosophical essay, the first of its kind that I am bringing in this series. Let me make a confession too: Camus is the only author who found a second place in this A2Z series. It is not only because of my admiration for the author but also because I couldn’t get a good novel whose title starts with the letter R. And a disclaimer: This book will put off readers who are not interested in philosophical and literary themes as well as style. A rebel is a person who says ‘No’ to the prevailing situation or system. But that would be mere teenage rebellion. Camus’s rebel is a person who simultaneously says a loud ‘Yes’ to his personal set of values with which he would replace what he doesn’t want to accept. Rebellion is not a negation, in other words. It is an affirmation of your own values which you know will promote the welfare of the human race. Rebellion is an act of forging a better soc