Wind, be not gone. Review on Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

One day, back in 1997, I was going through the things that my grandfather had left us when he passed away. Among certain other things were a few very old books, with covers that had partly been eaten away by insects and partly destroyed by other elements of nature. That was when I first laid eyes on the book that has been my favourite romantic novel till date. Since then I have read innumerable books and magazines, yet I have not come across such effective story-telling, uncanny humanising of characters, just the right amount of humour so that it does not let us deviate from the situtation and yet makes us laugh each time we read it, such as that encountered in ''America's best loved epic novel'', Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The narration in this particular book transforms the reader to the era in which the story is set, a time in which everything was slow and mellow, rich and hospitable. The book reveals all these emotions in such startling detail that I found myself wistfully longing for those days, days in which the most interesting that could happen was a barbeque thrown by a neighbouring friend and the only thing to worry about is the question as to which dress is to be worn or something akin to it. The book has such power that it can make one forget about what's really happening around you. I was so deeply engrossed in the book, that for two whole days I went about my duties like a zombie, whenever I had to be separated from it. For two whole days I spent every minute with it, and even when I had finished it I had not the mind to part with it and so believe it or not, I started to search for the parts that I had particularly enjoyed and then since that seemed to be too tedious a job I read the whole book a second time as soon as I had finished it the first time and this scared my mother so much that she hid the book from me after that. With regard to this book I will truly and completely agree with the Chicago Tribune when it says, ''A remarkable book, a spectacular book, a book that will not be forgotten''.

Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, Asley Wilkes, Melanie Wilkes, the four chief characters, though concocted from the same mind, and that too of a lady so many years back when women were expected not to think (and hence most of them faithfully fulfilled the obligation of not thinking for the sake of making true the concept of the time), but to be merely ''a thing of beauty and a joy forever'', are as different from each other as the four seasons are from each other, and each earns its part in the book in its own right. These four are not the only people who catch the fancy of the reader, the other characters namely mammy, Gerald O'Hara, Ellen O'Hara, John Wilkes, and all the other people including the slaves all play a significant part in bringimg out the beauty of the portrait that Gone With The Wind is.