some best novels

The ALCHEMIST By PAULO COELHO

Dreams, symbols, signs, and adventure follow the reader like echoes of ancient wise voices in "The Alchemist", a novel that combines an atmosphere of Medieval mysticism with the song of the desert. With this symbolic masterpiece Coelho states that we should not avoid our destinies, and urges people to follow their dreams, because to find our "Personal Myth" and our mission on Earth is the way to find "God", meaning happiness, fulfillment, and the ultimate purpose of creation. The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. After listening to "the signs" the boy ventures in his personal, Ulysses-like journey of exploration and self-discovery, symbolically searching for a hidden treasure located near the pyramids in Egypt. When he decides to go, his father's only advice is "Travel the world until you see that our castle is the greatest, and our women the most beautiful". In his journey, Santiago sees the greatness of the world, and meets all kinds of exciting people like kings and alchemists. However, by the end of the novel, he discovers that "treasure lies where your heart belongs", and that the treasure was the journey itself, the discoveries he made, and the wisdom he acquired. "The Alchemist", is an exciting novel that bursts with optimism; it is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen. That may sound like an oversimplified version of new-age philosophy and mysticism, but as Coelho states "simple things are the most valuable and only wise people appreciate them". As the alchemist himself says, when he appears to Santiago in the form of an old king "when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true". This is the core of the novel's philosophy and a motif that echoes behind Coelho's writing all through "The Alchemist". And isn't it true that the whole of humankind desperately wants to believe the old king when he says that the greatest lie in the world is that at some point we lose the ability to control our lives, and become the pawns of fate. Perhaps this is the secret of Coelho's success: that he tells people what they want to hear, or rather that he tells them that what they wish for but never thought possible could even be probable.

Coelho also suggests that those who do not have the courage to follow their " Personal Myth", are doomed to a life of emptiness, misery, and unfulfillment. Fear of failure seems to be the greatest obstacle to happiness. As the old crystal-seller tragically confesses: " I am afraid that great disappointment awaits me, and so I prefer to dream". This is where Coelho really captures the drama of man, who sacrifices fulfillment to conformity, who knows he can achieve greatness but denies to do so, and ends up living a life of void. It is interesting to see that Coelho presents the person who denies to follow his dream as the person who denies to see God, and that "every happy person carries God within him". However, only few people choose to follow the road that has been made for them, and find God while searching for their destiny, and their mission on earth. Consequently, is Coelho suggesting that the alchemists found God while searching for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone? What is certain is that the symbolism of the text is a parallel to the symbolism and the symbolic language of alchemism, and similarly the symbolism of dreams is presented as " God's language". It is also symbolic that Santiago finds his soul-mate, and the secrets of wisdom in the wilderness of the desert. The "wilderness" is a symbol that has been used by many great writers e.g.. Austen in "Mansfield Park", and Shakespeare in "King Lear". In the desert, Santiago meets his "twin-soul" and discovers that love is the core of existence and creation. As Coelho explains, when we love, we always try to improve ourselves, and that's when everything is possible. The subject of love inspires a beautiful lyricism in Coelho's writing: " I love you because the whole universe conspired for me to come close to you."

LIFE OF PI
BY Yann Martel
n the author's note that prefaces this vertiginously tall tale, Yann Martel blends fact and fiction with wily charm. Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world - eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism - and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another. But no, he didn't there meet a wise old man who directed him to a putative "main character", now living back in Martel's native Toronto: a certain Piscine Molitor or Pi Patel, named for a French swimming pool and nicknamed for an irrational number, who in the mid-1970s survived 227 days lost at sea with a Royal Bengal tiger.

Despite the extraordinary premise and literary playfulness, one reads Life of Pi not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure. When the ship in which 16-year-old Pi and his zookeeping family are to emigrate from India to Canada sinks, leaving him the sole human survivor in a lifeboat on to which barge a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a bedraggled, seasick tiger, Pi is determined to survive the impossible. "I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day." And Martel writes with such convincing immediacy, seasoning his narrative with zoological verisimilitude and survival tips about turtle- fishing, solar stills and keeping occupied (the lifeboat manual notes that "yarn spinning is highly recommended"), that disbelief is suspended, like Pi, above the terrible depths of the Pacific ocean.

Martel dextrously prepares us for the seafaring section in the first part of the book, which describes Pi's sunny childhood in the Pondicherry zoo and his triple conversion to Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. We learn much about animal behaviour - flight distances, aggression, social hierarchy - which is later translated to Pi's survival tactics on the lifeboat. Like a lion tamer in the circus ring, Pi must convince the tiger that he is the super-alpha male, using toots on his whistle as a whip and the sea as a source of treats, marking the boundary of his territory on the boat with urine and fierce, quaking stares.

The ongoing miracle of his existence at sea is also foreshadowed by his spiritual life on land; Pi is a creature of faith (or faiths) who sees eternally renewed wonder in God and his creation. There is joy on the lifeboat - as well as horror, and gore, and "tense, breathless boredom". He had chosen his irrational nickname because of his schoolmates' insistence on pronouncing Piscine as "pissing", but he also has a believer's scepticism about reason, "that fool's gold for the bright". In one of the many elegant, informative digressions in the book's first section, Martel takes us through instances of zoomorphism, whereby an animal takes a human or another animal to be one of its own species, and the usual predator-prey relationship is suspended. Pi characterises this adaptive leap of faith as "that measure of madness that moves life in strange but saving ways"; in other words, his coexistence with the tiger is possible precisely because it has never happened before.

Faith and science, two marvelling perspectives on the world, coexist throughout the book in a fine, delicate balance, as when the two Mr Kumars, one Pi's atheist teacher and the other the baker who introduces him to Islam, meet at the zoo to "take the pulse of the universe" and wonder together, in opposing ways, at the sheer surprisingness of the zebra and its stripes. In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author's note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to "bring out its essence".

The realism that carried the reader in the erratic wake of the small boy and large tiger falters as they begin to waste away and die - and then the book gets seriously strange, with ghostly visitations and impossible islands, as though Martel wants not so much to test our credulity as entirely to annihilate it. It's an odd tactic, though it does leave a fertile interpretative space, a dark undercurrent below the narrative's main structure, which has the neatness of fable.

Though horrors are hinted at, "this story", as the book had unfashionably assured us, "has a happy ending." Pi runs safely aground in Mexico, and the tiger about which he still has "nightmares tinged with love", which saved his life by coming between him and a more terrifying enemy, despair, leaps ashore and disappears into the jungle, denying him an anthropomorphic goodbye growl. Of course, the officials who arrive to investigate the ship's sinking don't believe him for a moment. In a daring coda, Pi offers them another story, which turns the tale on its head and seals Martel's extraordinary, one-off achievement. He had written earlier about how a blinkered dedication to factuality can lead one to "miss the better story". The better story has a tiger in it.

SHANTARAM

BY GREGORY DAVID

Shantaram is the fictionalized account of the real life adventures of author Gregory David Roberts. The narrator is a man called Lin, escaped from an Australian jail and arriving in Bombay, India with a fake New Zealand passport. He immediately meets a taxi driver named Prabaker who gives him tours of the city and a hut in the local slum. Lin starts a free clinic for the people in the slum, and to provide for his own income, he sells drugs to tourists. This gets him the attention of the local gangsters, and he's increasingly pulled into their world of crime, from counterfeiting to gun running to passport schemes. Lin falls in love, nearly dies in an Indian prison, and survives a continuing series of adventures. More than just an account of drugs and crime, Shantaram is the story of a man who, even in a life of violence, genuinely loves those in his life and the city that became his home, Bombay. Shantaram has received positive reviews with The Telegraph saying, "Shantaram is an exuberant, swashbuckling story of derring-do, told with reckless gusto and obvious affection, and if Roberts is no sort of stylist (and he isn't), you'd have to be a snob not to admit to enjoying yourself."

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Have you ever felt the need to know what exactly fantasy fiction is? If yes, this is an excellent book by a master story teller. This book is strictly to those people who accept the writer’s imagination, and are able to define with it; else any one seriously examining this book is going to find it full of Indian english jargon.

The second important thing to read this book, is you should have the nerve and patience to read through Salman Rushdie’s prose. Sometimes, there are sentences (without fullstop) carrying over 1 full page. Imagine one sentence from top to bottom of the page… It’s difficult to continue with that kind of writing but if you do cope with these minor things, then behold, for before you lies one of the greatest books written in history!

The story is as usual written in first person and begins with a remark on our independence. In fact in real sense, it is an autobiography of the fictional character. He begins with his birth, which by the stroke of luck, was at midnight on the day India gained freedom. Similarly like him hundreds of other children are born too and they all have one thing in common, the power of telepathy! All the people born on the stroke of midnight on Independence Day, 1947, have these powers!

The story begins in Bombay, moves to Pakistan, then to Bangladesh, to Bengal, to so many places, before eventually ending at Bombay again. The character explains his journeys and what all he experiences with similar people born on the same day (midnight’s children). The political and historic backdrop which Salman Rusdhie has used, works very well with the story. So well, that one might not notice that Gandhi is killed on a wrong day instead of January 30th 1948. Don’t worry, the book is full of chronological disorders, but that was the way the book was written in the first place.

The events co-incide and influence his life in more ways than one. Rushdie also takes a dig at Indira Gandhi, as the Widow, who is in fact also the main villain of the story! The Widow is out to kill all the gifted children, ‘cause she fears them. Of course, the gifted children as they are, do manage to escape. The author then returns to Bombay to carry on with his life in a pickle factory!

Rushdie’s main charm lies in the way he has mixed all the political events of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh effectively in the story; more so for the fact, almost all the events are at wrong times in history and yet its difficult to notice it!! Language has always been Rushdie’s forte. I cannot think of any other writer who can convey a 4-pageful of facts in 4 lines. The humour and sarcasm too are very well written and placed in the book.

Midnight’s Children is a story that makes excellent reading. It’s classic Rushdie. That’s what makes it excellent. But it’s that excellency – that Rushdie ability to create-a-perfect-story – is what keeps it from perfection. And in my opinion it truly deserved the BOOKER of BOOKERS.

Kite Runner
By Khaled Hosseini
In The Kite Runner, Amir and Hassan grow up together in Afghanistan like brothers, although they couldn't be more different. Amir is the son of a wealthy businessman, a Sunni Muslim, a Pashtun, and he's educated and reads voraciously. Hassan's father is a servant to Amir's father, and Hassan is a Sh'ia Muslim, a Hazara, he's illiterate, and he has a harelip. But neither boy has a mother and they spend their boyhoods roaming the streets of Kabul together. Amir, though, continually uses his superior position to taunt or abuse Hassan, and one day hides in fear as Hassan is beaten mercilessly by bullies. The Soviet invasion of Aghanistan sends Amir's family to the United States, but he returns there as an adult during the Taliban rule to atone for his sins to Hassan. Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan émigré living in San Francisco and his debut novel has received mostly good reviews. The Denver Post says The Kite Runner "ranks among the best-written and provocative stories of the year so far."

The Fountainhead
By Ayn Rand
yn Rand has proved the same in this 1943 classic, which can be described as ‘a hymn in the praise of an individual’. She has created a new style of writing with ‘The Fountainhead’ and her a subsequent novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’(1957). Both are valuable pieces of writing, having sold more than 5 million copies each. Rand, a Russian who migrated to the United States, took more than seven years to finish ‘The Fountainhead’. The novel was rejected by 12 publishers, and was finally accepted by the Bobbs- Merill Company and later went on to become an international bestseller.

The novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark is not the most loved person. He is not even the most liked person. But his strength lies in his belief of being indifferent to all except his work. He is the a compulsive dreamer, a man so honest, that he has never been affected by the frivolities of the world. His behavior may come across as rude, but his mindset is clear, as he aims to breakthrough the conventions of the world. He is honest, and blunt. A man so emotionally strong and content that work gives him the ultimate joy.
On the other hand, we have Peter Keating, frivolous and close minded. His main aim is to achieve success by hook or by crook. Unlike Howard, he is not a dreamer and thus gains popularity by being the superior’s pet or by diluting the importance of others.
Rand has created the plot of such a serious novel with love, ego, jealousy and passion, all well balanced. Dominique (Howard’s love), Gail Wynand, and Toohey make a mark as their characters have been uncompromisingly described.
This book is the ultimate classic. Telling the story of a hard working and never compromising Howard Roark, who is trialed by his school, his superiors, his love and the law. Affected only by his work and love, he emerges as the ultimate winner at in the end. Ayn Rand, teaches the reader to dream and be the most honest with his work. Drawing a contrast between Howard and Peter, the author justifies Peter’s selfishness as his weakness, and in the end, the reader is filled not with hatred, but with deep pity for him. It is the writer’s passion for her work that is reflected in through Roark’s character.
Drawing out very simple, but true images of the characters, their described physical appearances explains their nature. The book is easy to read but lengthy. Portraying different types of people from the different walks of life, all in a single maze, is defintely a triumph for the author. A change from the usual, melodramatic tales of the rich and beautiful, the blatant honesty of this book help the reader introspect and think of the superficialities of the world. The book is a 600 page journey in the life of Howard Roark, where you identify with him, laugh with him, work with him, cry with him, and win with him.

This book is a work of fiction, but has been influenced by people’s behavior and leanings.
Ayn Rand manages to astonish the reader with her boldness in writing, and simplicity in reasoning. She is truly a master of words, thought and of course, the creator of a legend.