As a child, I was not allowed to
watch Gone With the Wind along with my parents. Back then,
English movies for kids meant The Sound Of Music and
Honey I shrunk The Kids. And because the forbidden fruit is
sweetest, I longed for the time to come when I could redeem the wrong
of the past.
As luck
would have it, I could never catch it on T.V. or rent it or
borrow it(or even download it) and then, one fine day while at the
library, mentally calculating my chances of completing the voluminous
'The Suitable Boy', my eyes fell on this beautiful, red book. A
fourth the size of Vikram Seth's novel and still sitting pretty at
1024 pages, it took me some time to make a go for it;I had wanted
to see the movie.
And
when I called my mother, she told me not to strain my eyes reading
the thick book(* mothers will be mothers no matter how old we grow
up*), when she had herself read the book between those tomes at
the medical college( Another point- mothers can be
hypocrites too*).After realising I'm past persuasion tactics, she
talked excitedly about the characters which she funnily enough still
remembered by name .
The book is the story of Scarlett O' Hara, born to an Irish
father and a Southern aristocrat mother - a girl lustful of life but
chained to the subdued demeanor of the times by her mother's
admonitions. The book traces thirteen years of her unusual life- her
journey from a coquettish and frivolous young girl to shrewd,
manipulative woman who can make her way in a man's world. How she
realises, too late, the vanity of her childhood romance and the
purity of true love that withered under her neglect; the importance
of the order she trespassed all the time; and that her meek and
unobtrusive sister-in-law(Melanie Wilkes) was the silent
Pillar of strength for the entire post war society .That her
self-indulgent self could not see what the flamboyant **Rhett
Butler, like her fatherGerald O'Hara **and
her love Ashley, meant, when he said'like marries like'.
(*People can be short-sighted enough to not see and appreciate
those around them, even in entire lifetimes,
which is actually true.)
Gone With The Wind **is a slow novel . It takes a thousand
pages to cover a period a little over a decade. It gives interesting
insights of the American Civil war period(1861-1865 ) and the
life of black people of the time, how they blended with the
mainstream Whites and their own class structure. Also the social
norms of the time(in America and not so long ago) which
deemed fifteen a proper age for girls to be married and have children
too .
I have moved from page to page and digested it slowly,
sometimes not reading more than 5 pages in a day. But I feel it has
added something to me. The book is romantic, tragic, hilarious and
dramatic in parts.because the author(ess) perceives well the
human mind and its fallacies.* Don't miss it for anything, while I
continue my lookout(now hungrier) for the DVD.
