A story told by THACHANAKKARA through Subhash Chandran and the solitude of Marcquez for hundred years found adobe in my head recently. But that is not exactly true. When the chapters of the novel "MANUSHYANU ORU AAMUKHAM" (A Preface to Human Being) was appearing in MATHRUBHUMI weekly, if I remember correctly in 2009, I could read few of it. That novel haunted me for a while because of its beautiful narration and an unknown reader of MATHRUBHUMI. When the novel completed its journey in the weekly, one of the reader wrote his opinion about the novel. He gave a blast to my conventional thinking by stating that NARAPPILLA, whom I considered as villain till then was the actual hero of the story with mind-blowing reasoning. At that time itself I was eager to own the novel in book form and read it completely.
Few years back, I also happen read the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and wanted to know MACONDO in its length and breadth. Recently I purchased the book and started reading the amazing characterization of the people walked over MACONDO. The reading was slow, few pages per week, as it was English translation. Meanwhile I visited Kerala and found the Malayalam novel "MANUSHYANU ORU AAMUKHAM" in a shop and purchased it. Then I started reading those two books alternately and the characters started to appear out of there big and complicated family trees. Some branches from one novel broke out and got attached to another novel!
It is interesting to see that both THACHANAKKARA and MACONDO are imaginary places. Both authors are using time in excellent ease and clarity to narrate the incidents to give you a feeling of space-time continuum. But the vibes created in your brain by these two novels can be compared to the distance between Kerala and Colombia. Maybe the familiarity of the characters and lifestyle, for me, THACHANAKKARA was more real than MACONDO. Moreover, some of the places like MARTHANDAVARMA bridge on which Govindan and Achudan, everyday walked as school children, ALUVA river, and ULIYANNUR can be found in Google-Maps. But THACHANAKKARA was not only unreachable for the great carpenter, PERUNTHACHAN, but also Google-Maps. The precise explanation of locations and roads on which the eternal souls of the novel walked in the body form, made me almost believe that somehow Geography, History and Google-maps missed THACHANAKKARA.
