Louis de bernieres biography of mahatma gandhi
Time for another novella for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This is Week 3 (starting Monday 13 November) and the theme is Broadening My Horizons:
- Pick your top novellas in translation and think about new genres or authors you’ve been introduced to through novellas.
Well, I have broadened my horizons, but the remarkable novella I’ve just read isn’t in translation. Swami and Friends (1935) was written in English by the great Indian author R K Narayan. There are 44 reviews of books by Indian and Anglo-Indian authors on this blog, but prior to this I had never read anything by an Indian author written before Indian independence in 1947.
On his Wikipedia page, we learn that
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (1906 – 2001), better known as R. K. Narayan, was an Indian writer and novelist known for his work set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was a leading author of early Indian literature in English along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.
Narayan’s mentor and friend Graham Greene was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s first four books including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. The fictional town of Malgudi was first introduced in Swami and Friends. (Narayan’s Wikipedia page, lightly edited).
Ostensibly written as a children’s novel, Swami and Friends (1935) is more than that. In 2019 the BBC listed Swami and Friends on its list of the 100 most influential novels, (and in 2015, Robert McCrum at the Guardian berated himself for overlooking the book in his list of the Best 100.) This novella is a vivid portrait of childhood in British India but it also shows how a childhood was impacted by significant events in the pre-partition era. So though the story focusses on the universalities of childhood — school, friendships, relationships within the family and
Leo Tolstoy Biography
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1887) by Ilya Repin, pixabay
Leo Tolstoy was born Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana near Tula, Russia. He grew up in an aristocratic Russian family with four siblings. By the time Tolstoy turned 10, both of his parents had passed away. He attended a Russian university but did not finish his degree. He and his brother fought in the Crimean war (1853-1856); Tolstoy’s horror at what he witnessed during the war would lead to a lifelong passion for nonviolence.
Following his release from the army, Tolstoy traveled around Europe. During his travels, he adopted the moral positions that would guide his life’s work and his writing—nonviolence, the importance of education, and a disdain for the aristocracy.
Upon his return to Russia, Tolstoy married Sofya Andreyevena Bers; the couple had 13 children, three of whom died in infancy. In the period after he married Sofya (commonly referred to by the Russian diminutive, Sonya) and raised his children, Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, his two masterpieces.
Did you know that Sonya hand-wrote the entire manuscript of War and Peace eight times? She was tasked with copying the new version of the novel each time Tolstoy revised it. When it was first published it had about 1,200 pages—that's almost 10,000 handwritten pages.
In his later years, Tolstoy became more interested in morality and religion. He rejected many of his earlier works, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as being unrealistic, and he wrote treatises on religion and politics. He was particularly interested in nonviolence and pacificism, which he derived from Christian teachings.
Tolstoy was opposed to private land ownership and espoused the economic beliefs of Georgism. He was a strong believer in education and founded 13 schools where he grew up, specifically for the children of Russian peasants.
Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy was . Bitácora donde voy tomando apuntes y notas a vuelapluma sobre los libros que voy leyendo sin aspiración alguna de conseguir nada sistemático ni profundo. Especie de modesto Reader's Digest de documentos que me voy encontrando por la Red sobre cualquiera de los temas que me interesan (política, artes, historia, tecnología, educación, cultura general...) y que me parecen dignos de mención. Con suerte, la periodicidad será semanal. Link to my own reading projects, covering fiction, essay, drama, music, cinema and arts on a wide collection of topics. It is my own way to structure knowledge. Although I don't watch much TV, the programs I do watch are carefully chosen. They tend to be documentaries or movies I find interesting. I publish here some reviews as well as thoughts that occurred to me as a consequence of these. Colección de imágenes, documentación y reflexiones variadas sobre el mundo de las artes plásticas en su sentido más laxo: pintura, escultura, fotografía, arquitectura... Personal reviews of whichever albums I am listening to at the moment. A highly subjective section of the website (yes, even more than the others!). Un clásico de la filosofía oriental que me ha interesado desde mis años juveniles. Aquí hago una lectura capítulo a capítulo, y comento con reflexiones variadas acerca del contenido. Análisis más o menos detallado de algunos de los mejores poemas de la literatura universal, incluyendo no sólo información acerca del contexto, sino también un comentario de las estrofas. Collection of texts on a wide variety of topics downloaded from the Internet, analyzed and commented. This section is password protected. If you are a friend who would like to take a look, please contact me. By Benjamin Greenaway & St