Last week, some more books from Chennai, arrived. And I was waiting to get my hands all over them. This set includes this year’s most talked about books in The Chennai Book Fair 2006. The most expected was Aathavan’s Shortstory Collection with which I now own all of Aathavan’s works published recently. I know I’ve been rambling about Aathavan for sometime now and that’s because of a simple reason, thamizh kurum nallulagam has missed a great writer and given him to the floods. I have just started to read this one but I’ve to say Kizhakku Pathippagam has done a noble job of compiling the aathavan’s shortstories to feed his hungry fans. Indra Parthasarathy’s foreword where he talks about his student Aathavan, clearly details the sorrow of missing a great writer.

Aathavan had a unique style which I couldn’t compare to anyone before or even after him. I have this feeling that no one, literally no one details the middle class urban life as we see and live it. Sujatha to a large extent came closer to this. However, some of his urban stories moved away from the middle-class life that some(!!) of us lived. They moved away into a fantasy world which makes you earn for a middle-class life like that. Sample, the scene where Arvind Swamy smokes before his mom in Roja. Didn’t most(!!) of us think, what a cool idea it is to have a mom like that ? Whether its morally/physically wrong or right, didn’t we feel that the conversation they had in that scene, however exaggerated it seemed, was so damn cool. That’s Sujatha. Aathavan was a little different. He wrote and wrote about the urban family life and he wrote it just like that. Just like that. The exaggerations were minimal. In this arena, we don’t have a author in Tamil, parallel to Aathavan.

More…http://www.lazygeek.net/archives/2006/02/books_from_chennai.html