The Tales Pensieve

The most of the memories a person makes is during his childhood, especially during his school life. The book I had been reading for a week – The Last Soul Children by Aman Chougle is a perfect picture of childhood memories depicted through various short episodes that are stitched together in order to create a thread of recollections.

The book contains thirteen different stories where the author has recalled some of his childhood encounters. The stories have some major things in common and that are way too evident. To start with, all the stories present in the book, as I already said in the beginning, are memories. It is quite clear that the stories might have a strong connection to the life of the author. All the stories are about childhood friends, friendship and innocence and then how it turned out to be in the future – wether the innocence of friendship remained the same or was it adulterated with the flow of time. As you turn the pages of the book, you would clearly relate yourself with the memories of the author because we all might have had a friend as he mentions in the stories or a bully in our school or a girl that almost all the boys fancied. There might be instances of friendship that got faded away with the sway of time that you might relate to. The author is successful in creating such representations of boyhood that will certainly strike a chord in the readers or evoke a certain memory quite obviously.

The stories not only expressed the childhood friendships of the author but also it explained some emotional aspects of his life like his first love, separation, forgetting each other with time and then the usual reminiscence. The stories have been given symmetry by starting each story with a reminiscence of childhood, an analysis of how things used to be when they were naïve as children and then he jumps on to the present and presents to us an image of maturity and the adultery that came with it. Most of the stories depict the despondency that is resulted by maturity and the change in characteristics that comes along with it. In almost every story, the author has moaned about the change that came up in a friend he really admired or a relationship that went through a change as he grew up.

In the last story, the author has explained how and why he decided on the title of the book. The explanation is definitely a pleasure to read. The last part might not be a story of some sort but it keeps you engaged till the end.

I would say, really appreciate the author for creating such a beautiful amalgamation of childhood and memories. As a reader I found it very relatable and engaging. At the end, we are not sure if the stories are real life instances or are an outcome of the author’s explicit imagination, but if they are not real, the author has done a great job of making them look real.

Read to re-live that childhood that once was…

Title: The Last Soul Children
Author: Aman Chougle
Publisher: Partridge India
Pages: 96
Genre/ Sub-Genre: Fiction/ Short Stories
Rating:  3.50 of 5.00
Reviewed for: Author

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