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The flight of the falcon - Daphne du Maurier

Do you like flashback movies/stories ? The stories where past is slowly revealed to you, wherein during each small incident you are carried back in time to something that happened long ago , those stories where as you go on living in the present you catch glimpses of the past , where present floats along with past.
I love them.

The first such book that comes into my mind is “Wuthering Heights”. It is not the chief protagonist comes back to his home kind of story. Well ! you can say that about Heathcliff. But the seeker of past is Lockwood, a person who comes to stay for a short while in the Yorkshire moors, it is his curiosity to know more about his landlord that lets Nellie, his maidservant unleash the tempestuous past into his mind.

It is the reason why I liked “God of small things” too. This is more dramatic. The present belongs to Estha and Rahel. But the way you get to walk along their , their mother’s , uncle’s, grand-parent’s past, would grip you into the novel. Here you are , in a moment reading about Pappachi and his moth and the next moment you are looking at Estha and Rahel going to airport to receive their cousin and the next moment you are in present. The best thing is you seek next page to next page trying to get to know how Sophie mol died or what actually happened to Ammu.

Even “Paradist Lost” followed this style of story telling. Starts in the middle and reveals the past slowly as you progress along present in the story.

Which are the other such movies/stories that I remember ?
Books : Lord of the Rings, Memories of another day, The Catcher in the Rye, well ! even Harry Potter for that matter. ….
Movies : Thalavattam, Titanic ? .. I guess a lot of Malayalam movies are told in this fashion. Probably that’s where the beauty of these movies comes from.

“The flight of the falcon” is one such book. Here it is Armino Fabbio, a tourist guide, who goes back to the place of his childhood, to Ruffano.

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ravwe said…
Have you noticed how Maniratnam is experimenting with this style of storytelling? Allaipayuthe starts in the present till the titles are done and then runs into the past, oscillates between the past and the present till the past merges with the present. Ayudha Eyuthu has the 3 protagonists in a common incident which is the most important scene of the movie. From there he traces each of the 3 characters until that scene. The second half is from that scene beyond. Actually careful observation will show the story is being told from a third person’s point of view. Waiting for Mani’s next….

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