Author: Punathil Kunhabdulah
Translator(s): Elzy Tharamangalam
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 206
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126010746
Description
The story of Smaraka Silakal (Memorial Stones) is woven round a mosque and its surroundings. The author introduces the reader to a burial ground where many extinguished lives have found their lives and resting place. The novelist resurrects their lives and makes the characters re-enact their roles.
The key figure is Pukkoya Thangal of the rich Arakkal family whose character is a rare mixture of dignity, benevolence, and inhuman lust. His story is supplemented by those of a horde of others quite different in their nature and approach to life and society-cantankerous, selfish men, their innocent and salient victims, illegitimate children of the wealthy who suffer life long humiliation, and conscientious but helpless spectators of this drama, etc.
The author presents all these men and women before the reader in a manner marked by an almost total detachment. The novel Memorial Stones won the author both Kerala Sahitya Akademi and Sahitya Akademi awards respectively in 1977 and 1980.
THE TRANSLATOR:
ELZY THARAMANGALAM has a PhD in English literature writes poetry and translates from Malayalam into English.