The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I put this book on my Christmas list last year and got it. I'd heard so much about it, and it won the Booker Prize, so I was keen to read it, but somehow it ended up on my shelf waiting for the right moment. And I've been in a difficult reading phase, since the Discovery of Heaven ruined me for other books. There are five or six half-finished novels lying on my bedside table. It was going to take something powerful to snap me out of it.

And this book did the trick! It is really a long, drawn out torture of foreshadowing, as we are haunted by the violent ending from the very beginning. But Arundhati Roy's writing style is so free and courageous, poetic and funny, that you don't mind being pulled along to events that make you wince even before you guess what they are. Oh, it says here at the back of the book that John Updike calls it "a work of highly conscious art". I didn't get that - it felt spontaneous to me, but whaddo I know?

Much of the story revolves around the lives of two egg twins, Rahel and Estha. If love is expressed in nicknames, then these characters are drowned in affection early on eg. Stick Insect and Elvis Pelvis. Their mother has left their drunken father and brought them to live with her family in Kerala, India, in 1969. The politics and caste system are threads in the plot, but it is the little poetic descriptions that hold it together. They recur like gossip between friends, inside jokes that make the horrible even more upsetting when it happens.

"Across the tall iron railing that separated Meeters from the Met and Greeters from the Gret, Chacko, beaming, bursting through his suit and sideways tie, bowed to his new daughter and ex-wife.

In his mind, Estha said, 'Bow.'

'Hello, Ladies,' Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice (last night's voice in which he said, Love. Madness. Hope. Infinnate Joy). 'And how was your journey?'

And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside."

(Just to give you an idea) ...

---

Leave a comment

name
email (if you want to be notified)
<-- Please retype the word you see here:
Notify me when someone replies to this post?

---