Because of a lifestyle that bears daily witness to the grandeur, mercy, and cruelty of nature, these men have possessed, for generations, a personality filled with faith in God, a sense of adventure, and comradeship and trust toward fellow humans. They are like Hemingway’s Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, says these words during a grueling, multi-day battle with a giant marlin.
Chandra Thangaraj’s novella, Yellow Faces That Emerged from a Dream,searches for answers to these very questions. In this work, of about a hundred pages, Chandra presents the adolescence of a woman named Leela through her “dream-spaces of time.” At the beginning of the novel,
As Rasapandi ascends, the external landscape prompts him to retreat inward. Memory and reality alternate, and this relentless memory shapes both perspective and emotion—it persists on its own accord…
The novel’s most profound strength is that none of these characters are reduced to a single note. There is a Nishant who, early on, refuses to rinse his own plate, yet later works the dish pit in a diner.
The novel’s first image seems like a backdrop. By the end, you realize it was the entire story. Siddhartha grows up beside a river, in the shade of a mango grove, with his loyal friend Govinda always near. A boy who begins beside a river will one day become a ferryman on one.
What makes his fiction distinctive is the precision with which he records uncertainty, especially the confused inner lives of people trying to understand themselves while already being shaped by the world around them.
