Sidharth Vardhan

Tag: unrequited love

Chronicle of a Death Foretold – a review

(A review by Sidharth Vardhanof ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ –  a novel by Nobel laureate  Gabriel García Márquez) ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ is a journalistic account of a murder, and not at all detective-like at that. In very first pages both the murderers and the murdered are revealed. It is only the writing style of Gabriel Marquez that makes this average story so enjoyable. , Gabriel put the Santigo’s flip side in the very beginning and then goes on to reveal the motive of murder which makes you believe that the murder may have some justification. Slowly though we realize he probably didn’t do the thing he was murdered for. The character gets more humane in later half; still, his behavior, especially in those last moments is strange. The chronicle shows you the hollow nature of society. A really, really expensive marriage wouldn’t survive a day. Angela Vicaro’s writing letters to her husband for seventeen years is something so weird that you won’t believe it to be real if you didn’t know otherwise – especially because she didn’t want to be married to him in the first place. Then there is the fact that only hours before the murder,

One Hundred Years of Magic

(A review by Sidharth Vardhanof ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ –  a novel by Nobel laureate  Gabriel García MárquezFirst reviewed on August 27, 2014) “How are you, Colonel?” he asked in passing. “Right here,” he answered. “Waiting for my funeral procession to pass …..” Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.” Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) You know what is common between “One hundred years of solitude’, Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Twilight’?…You either love them or make fun of them. This one fell in the first category for me. The things that make this book so special to some are also the things that make it boring top others. The theme of time moving in circles with names and events repeating is both beautiful and boring. Look at names for example. There are twenty-two Aurlianos in it, four Arcadeos and three Remodeos. There is an Ursula, an Amranta and an Amranta

On Innocence

I’m not much into romantic stories – I mean how much of ‘Ellen, I love you’ and ‘Newland, it is wrong’ one can bear? More so, love triangles – and why they call it love triangles. Just look at this one – Archer has relations with May and Ellen but the two women do not love each other, so where is the third side of the triangle? Shouldn’t it be called love angle or love V? In fact, if you think about it, a love triangle is only possible when at least one of three people is homosexual or bisexual … well, that is just the kind of thing I wonder about when not working on my paper on quantum mechanics involved in the motion of Nitrogen particles in low atmospheric temperatures. Also, I don’t much like leisure classes; for me they represent half the things that are wrong with the world – they are hypocrites, full of ideas of ‘society’ and ‘common folks’, vain, sinfully rich, are always talking about useless subjects like- other equally boring people, balls, marriages, clothes (clothes! Clothes!), food etc. The good thing is Wharton doesn’t much like them either. Different Forms of Innocence There

Sidharth Vardhan

Three Cigarettes and a Song

All posts, Fiction, Short Stories

A tribute to Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities) and Damien Rice (Cheers Darling)A short story First written on March 26, 2018) As usual, she had her beautiful smile on when she opened the door and she greeted him with her daily question, addressing him, as she always did, with his last name “How you are doing today, Carton?” He greeted her back – never ever answering the question, asked her after her husband and went to meet her children. The children were waiting for him to arrive as he was their playmate and played the game with the same excitement as they did – only losing deliberately to his younger rivals. “You will never learn Carton” the young girl would say with a shake of the head and using his last name much like her mother. “You just wait and watch, I will surely beat you two tomorrow.” He would say pretending to take the challenge. Soon they all took their dinner and then it was time to put the children in their bed. As per ritual, he told them a bedtime story – a new one every day as their parents would watch and once the children were

A tale of a broken heart

(A review of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ a novel by by Charles DickensFirst written in September 9, 2015) “No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him—an instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!” Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities French Revolution must have been too big a thing for Dickens to miss given his protests against class discrimination and constant effort to be the voice of conscience for English rich. In fact, he actually managed to portray the Paris of time well enough , IMO, despite his caricature-like characters and the boring tone he often took. And all that is good but the truth is three of four

A Disease You will Love

(A review of ‘Love in Time of Cholera’ –  a novel by Nobel laureate  Gabriel García MárquezFirst read on May 16, 2014) Probably the only time that I will rate a book with word ‘Love’ in its title with five stars but there are very few stories so completely told – I love every single word in this book. From very first sentence Marquez captures your attention and starts a story that is like pure music, moving in perfect rhythm, moving between scenes in a perfect flow, so that you move through pages without stopping to think – the way you carry on listening to good music without trying to focus on lyrics. The tribute to love is obvious from the very beginning, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. ” Gabriel García Márquez (Love in Time of Cholera) However, even the urequited love is better than no love at all. “It is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.” Gabriel García Márquez (Love in Time of Cholera) and later, “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.” Gabriel García

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