Seven Summers & Morning Face - Brief Summary

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      Seven Summers was published in 1951. It is the first volume of Anand’s fictional autobiography in seven volumes. In 1926, Anand wrote a 2000-page confession as a lovelorn lover in England. It deals with the first seven years of the hero’s childhood. The boy (hero) has many friends. Bakha, the son of a sweeper, and the hero of Untouchable, is one of them. The novel ends with the breaking out of the War in 1914; his mother’s comment being, “The end of the Kali-Yug has come”. The whole series of Seven Summers has been worked out after Shakespeare’s analysis of life in its seven ages in his play As You Like It.

      Morning Face was appeared in 1968. It is the second volume of Anand’s Seven Summers or The Seven Ages of Man. In the first volume, Krishan, the boy lives with his father in the cantonment. Now he goes first to Amritsar and then to Ludhiana where his elder brother is an Assistant Jailor. Krishan has entered into boyhood from childhood, hence he has got a “shining morning face”. Iyengar says, Krishan is subject to all the visible and invisible stresses and tension in a sprawling family of uncles, aunts, cousins and other relations. At the close of the novel Krishan says “I realized that, perhaps, I seemed mad because of the new kind of poetry in me. But I wanted to sing, from within my chest, to release the vague, incomprehensible lava of song from within me. I wanted to howl from the fullness of my dreams....I wanted to be a God, speaking inspired words, after struggling with myself; working into myself, and awakening to the freedom of the whole universe, with superhuman strength.”

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