There is a lot of interesting material in here: about Kerala and its ways of life; about the terrible strictures of the caste system (especially in the late 1960s) and how Christianity was (is?) barely even a nominal escape from them; about Communism in India; about the ways in which colonial attitudes partly persisted, and partly mutated, in the 60s and the 90s (this might be one of the most overtly, directly post-colonial novels I've read, in the way it highlights these things); and about where 1990s India was at with pollution, commercialisation and tourism (the paragraphs about the kathakali dancers are amazing and tragic).

But the writing also exemplifies so much that can be tedious and annoying about literary fiction; it has the early-21st century Anglo-American Creative-Writing course style without ever having been near one of those workshops - except, no doubt, as a lauded text read by the students as a model to emulate. It has those brittle, faintly melancholic, static descriptions, with the addition of metaphors that feel like notebook jottings inserted into the text because they were jewel-like and deserved to be displayed somewhere.

It has modern, fragmented sentence structures: it was curious to find a problem opposite to the one I had with Balzac, whom I was reading last month: where his sentences could often be chopped into two or three with zero loss of meaning or flow, here there are bits that would have sounded better joined up.

And almost nothing bloody happens for ¾ of the book, aside from two short and significant incidents. Yes there were sentences that connected with me, and some endearing incidents, but these felt like islands in a monotonous sea of 'quite bored'. There is frequent repetition, meant to invoke a mythic quality, but these repeated paragraphs were too literary and detailed in their content, and not rhythmic enough to feel mythical when the last book I'd finished *was* mythology. During these doldrums, hints are dropped about the Big Stuff that happened (it's one of those literary novels which hinges on That Fateful Day) but most of the action is shoved into the last 25%, and whilst the story does then become quite gripping, it persists with non-chronological chapters, as if to continue the frustration. This suspense feels artificial, as characters mostly aren't in a similar state of suspension themselves. It's too much like a potboiler thriller where the big secret isn't revealed until the end, as if that was all the book had to give.

There is a decent but shorter Thumping Good Read type of novel in here, in which the story is told pretty much chronologically. Though when I say 'decent' … does anyone else remember how in 00s (or maybe 90s) to early 2010s litfic, consensual incest was a bizarrely common trope? Here it is again in this book. I don't think I've seen it in a new novel since Ghana Must Go (2013).

The God of Small Things has been frequently compared with the work of Salman Rushdie, and whilst Roy said she hadn't read him before writing this book, she evidently picked up a great deal by osmosis, as listed for example here. This novel even does the same thing Rushdie did at the conclusion of Midnight's Children, ending with a wonderful final chapter that leaves the reader on a high note, provoking a burst of goodwill that could overshadow the tedium felt during earlier swathes of the book. (Unlike with Midnight's Children the weight of tedium was still too high for me to rate God of Small Things higher than 3 stars, but the last quarter did mean it was well clear of the 2-star zone.)

I felt there were two main differences from Rushdie. There's a default seriousness here. Even though there are, eventually, humorous lines in the narrative, there isn't the same bawdy, carnivalesque atmosphere: this is grim, depressing reality with a few peak moments. And that, arguably, may also be a part of the other difference: it reads like a 90s feminist take on Rushdie's India. Distinctively 90s-feminist because it's not yet fully intersectional: the narrative is deeply aware of the interplay of caste, age, gender and colonial legacies, but a feminist wouldn't quite get away now with these disgusted descriptions of older women's bodies, even if the old women in question are villains, or agents of a villainous system. Has the honesty of the young and early-middle aged been traded for the hope of creating different ways of seeing and thinking in younger readers and in some of the more easily influenced older ones? Or was some of that "honesty" formed via reading younger and/or male authors of decades past and concluding that this is how to see and describe old women? 90s because of its choice of response to male sexualisation of women: sexualising men - including, in this case, a remarkably frequent mention of men's (and male animals') balls when they have no great relevance to the narrative. 90s because women can be identified with or compared to men without its being a big deal: Rahel identifying with Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, or a mother who died a pauper's death and is wrapped in an old sheet being described as resembling a Roman senator. Rahel, and occasionally Ammu, have a certain amount of freedom because they slipped through the cracks that other Indian women of their family backgrounds didn't. They just do their thing, and these moments are not occasions for polemics as they might have been in an Anglo-American novel from the 1970s or the 2010s.

Ammu seems, in many of the things she says, like a feminist mum of her age from a Western novel (born in the 1940s, had kids in the 1960s), including that once-ubiquitous phrase "male chauvinist pig", which faded away years ago - saying it these days would be consciously vintage; only recently has there been something like a direct replacement, in "toxic masculinity". Ammu is more western than many white Anglo readers might expect, but in this book things are never that simple: she is also caught up in the traps of caste and the way it was catalysed by imperialism; her life is a microcosm of the complicated interaction of forces in the novel.

The two upper-caste old women's liberation from tradition and routine via trash American TV could also be seen as very 90s: the decade when pop culture became academic and respectable, and TV started to broadcast round the clock. Now the passivity involved in TV addiction seems remarkable compared with the internet.

However, all the books mentioned - mostly those Rahel and Esta read - are considerably older; and almost all of them I read as a kid too. There is a much greater similarity between what they (a year or so younger than the author) read in the late 60s and early 70s, and what I read in the 80s, than between my childhood reading and that of people 15 years younger than I am. These books, most of them English, and including more than one by Kipling, are another indicator of the complicated way aspects of colonial culture persisted in post-Independence India. Meanwhile, The God of Small Things moves beyond that colonial literary world in the way it focuses on India, and it also doesn't make compromises for the global market as novels would start to do during the 00s (as described in this article by Tim Parks), for instance in character names. If the reader without Indian heritage has to remind themselves periodically that Estha is a small Indian boy (and, if a they are British person of middle age or older, has to push away from the front of their mind an icon of Esther Rantzen) shouldn't that be seen as a route to active awareness about the ways places are different and don't always map neatly on to other cultures? (Though marketers know, I guess, that not everyone is willing to do these exercises and to take them seriously.)

I first bought a copy of The God of Small Things in a second-hand bookshop around 2-4 years after its Booker win. (I was - naively - surprised that it was there already, and felt pretty much obliged to buy it for that reason. It was shiny, heavy paper: perhaps an ARC or an export trade paperback? Or were all the early paperback copies like that?) I never could get beyond the first few pages, though I felt I ought to, and it ended up in a charity shop a few more years later. Reading The God of Small Things now in 2019, and also recently a novella by Simone de Beauvoir, has shown me that if I abandoned books or authors twenty-odd years ago because I didn't like them - rather than because I didn't have time, or events got in the way - I'm probably not going to love them now either. (The main exceptions have been when I read a new translation instead, in a way a different book written by someone else.) I read some of Roy's political non-fiction about India a few years ago, and whilst I didn't know enough background to appreciate it fully, I preferred her direct treatment of the issues there to the structure of this novel.

I re-bought The God of Small Things as a 99p sale ebook in 2015, when I hadn't quite got past the idea that I ought to try and read all the books I'd ever owned on paper. (I think this is a terrible idea now, subjecting oneself to years of needless tedium and wasted time because of bad decisions made in bookshops circa 2005. It's a curious subtype of sunk cost fallacy - or shopping penance.)

In 2019 The God of Small Things is one of the relatively few books/authors mentioned in the blurb for the BBC's upcoming Novels that Shaped Our World which I have never read, and the shortest of those, since I read Oroonoko about six weeks ago, *and* it fits a slot in the Catching Up On Classics group bingo, *and* it would mean I'd read another Booker winner. It needed all those reasons, plus reading along with the audiobook some of the time (for the first quarter, and then that tricky 50-75% phase where it's easy to feel like nothing is moving) to push through it, but the final quarter was mostly rewarding. And now I know what people are talking about WRT this book - and there's a lots out there that has been said, with it having become a set text.

The audio, as someone who doesn't like a fast reading, is very good, and engaging. The narrator's use of accents might divide opinion, and people with Indian heritage will know whether Aysha Kala is doing Keralan accents right. But for me it added an extra dimension as it made me think about how no-one had ever told me that Indian English accents should be thought of the same way as American or Australian or Canadian (Canadian perhaps especially relevant because they manage to have one other national language, French) - and not, as somehow seemed to be implied, an indicator of someone speaking English as a foreign language. I had to work this out for myself in adulthood. All that must be a legacy of colonial attitudes in the UK. And this extended into thinking about the status of Indian English in the West, and that perhaps this novel, as "the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author" has been a small part of starting to mainstream it as one of the world Englishes.

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

n  “Anything’s possible in Human Nature.”n

Good morning Goodreaders! Please be forewarned: If you aren’t familiar with me and are here because this (1) randomly showed up on your feed due to a mutual acquaintance we share or (2) because you are expecting a super smart opinion piece on a modern classic, I have one thing to say to you . . . . .

n  n

In case the .gif didn’t clue you in, I’m not going to offer any sort of literary insight in this space. What I am going to do is what I always do, which is - not talk about the book for a bit.

Still here? Probably not. For the three of you who are, you’re probably actual friends of mine and are asking “how the hell did this get on her TBR?” or “she does know this isn’t a porno or a young adult selection, right?” Amazingly, the answer is YES I do know things – even that this won the Booker Prize . . . . . .

n  n

But if I’m going to be 100% honest I have to admit I read this for one reason and one reason alone . . . . .

n  n

If you know me, you’ll know I’m a real whore when it comes to getting free swag from the library. The artist formerly known as the Adult WINTER Reading Challenge has now become the Adult SUMMER Reading Challenge and I will do whatever it takes in order to win this season’s prize pint glass that I can drink mass quantities of beer from . . . . .

n  n

Allow me a moment to apologize to my pal Kristin. You see, Kristin is one of only a few people (I’m talking you can count them on one hand and still have fingers left over) who has been able to break the fourth wall and become my friend on Facebook as well as Goodreads (meaning she’s the one who can confirm I’m really as awful everywhere as I am here and am not Catfishing you) so she’s being inundated with updates regarding my joy. I’m picturing her saying something along these lines once she sees this post . . . . .

n  n

I’m truly sorry Kristin. I wish Erica weren’t such a horrible librarian and would take care of your request for free shit.

Anyway, back on “topic” (HA!). As you can see above, the theme this year is to “Push Your Shelf” which kind of blows because I’m more than content here in my bubble. Buuuuuuuuuut (surprising as it may be), I do like to follow the rules of the challenge. The generic terms to win the glass are “read 5 books between X and Y date,” which we all know is easy peezy lemon squeezy for yours truly. The “pushing your shelf” means you’re supposed to read something that takes you out of your comfort zone – which I didn’t think was possible since, you know, I live with Mitchell. Turns out “comfort zone” for this one equated to smarty farty and had me looking a lil’ summin’ like this for quite a while . . . .

n  n

As the author says in the Q&A section, The God Of Small Things “begins at the end and ends in the middle.” Readers are aware early on that a child has died, that a twin was sent away to live with his father and returned 23 years later, that his sister has returned to India from America in order to reunite and that a forbidden romance of some sort took place. It takes nearly the remainder of the book to circle back around in order to fill in the details regarding these events. AND IT WAS SERIOUSLY PURPLE IN PROSE. That was nearly a dealbreaker for me. The characters, setting, etc. had me pretty enraptured, but I am just not a superfan of “beautiful” writing. Lucky for me, there were moments like these that a simpleton such as myself could enjoy . . . .

n  “He might change,” Ammu says.

“How d’you mean? Change into what?” Sophie Mol asked.

“Into a Male Chauvinist Pig,” Rahel said.

“Very unlikely,” Estha said.n

^^^^Estha being a young boy at the time and the potential “male chauvinist pig” in question.

While this selection was a bit of a slog for me, the “round about” delivery ended up being pretty brilliant and I am very glad it was one of the recommended reads for this challenge as I would have never read it if that hadn’t happened. I also discovered the author was charged with a criminal offense of “corrupting public morality” and tied up in court proceedings for years which means I probably need to put better locks on the doors so Mitchell can’t track her down. As for the moment in the book that caused the charge??????

n  n

Ha! You know I don’t have that reaction to most anything. Actually I thought the scene in question cheapened what otherwise was a real one-of-a-kind type of read.

As soon as I finished reading it, I literally turned it over and began reading it again. (Later, I discovered that a reviewer said and did the exact same thing!) This book is incredibly crafted--in plot, in structure, in language, in emotion. I read it to remind myself of that kind of book I hope to write someday. One of my all-time top-5 desert island books.

This is, without a doubt, the single worst book ever written.
It makes virtually no sense, jumping from past to present tense so often and without warning that you have no idea whats going on. Out of nowhere the writer mentions filthy disturbing sexual things for no reason. I could not even find a story in there, just meaningless jibberish.
The thing that amazes me most though, is that while i am yet to meet a single person that LIKES this book, it makes it onto all the top 100 lists etc.
I can only believe that this is because there is NO point to the book, but the reviewers and people that complile the book lists feel that no book can be written without reason and so they must be missing the point of it, and therefore rate the book very highly, so they seem as though they are incredibly intelligent and gained some sort of deep understanding from this book of garbage.


End Rant.

ديگه واقعا يك نويسنده بايد چه‌كار كنه!؟؟
يه كتاب‌هايى رو كه می‌خونى و با خودت می‌گى ديگه چه كتابى می‌تونه مثل اين باشه و بازم همين‌جورى يا بيشتر ازش خوشت بياد؟!!!
همه‌جوره كتاب بسیار خوبی بود و درباره‌ش چیزی نمی‌تونم بگم جز اينكه حيف كه كتاب‌هايى مثل اين کتاب ناياب هستند و خيلى كم خونده شده و كتاب‌های ضعيف بارها چاپ می‌شن!!!

(Finished it, finally!)

I saw this book once in a bookstore (with study guide) and had an impression that it's one of those dense and dry boring books that literature students are supposed to (or perhaps even forced to) analyze and admire all the greatness and wisdom there. It was a careless thought, but turns out that it wasn't exactly wrong to think so. This novel certainly has it's merits, but it felt rather tedious and often boring.

  The story line is messy and incoherent. It needs to be read very carefully to make some sense of what is happening and when and where it's happening.

The writing- I both liked and disliked. In a way, it's lush, brilliant, poignant- also impressive, especially for a debut. Yet, there were so many descriptions that in my experience didn't actually add something to the story. A lot of lines I had to read twice to make some sense.

     After reading about first 80 pages, I was pretty much bored with it. Even the frequent foreshadowing wasn't of much help to raise my interest or curiosity. I didn't care much for the characters for the most part of the novel; but at times, I really felt for them. Most of the action happens in last 90 or so pages, so that held my interest.

I feel like Miss Roy has employed all her skills in creating flowery language but hasn't paid enough attention to actual storytelling.
Despite my complaints about this book, I liked the themes explored here. This novel has strong themes, and powerful thought-provoking lines, and razor-sharp clever observations.
It left me wondering whether the scandal would've been less infuriating if Velutha had not been a Pravan, Untouchable?
How would've this family reacted to the scanadal if Sophie Mol hadn't died?

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

"Her own gief grieved her, his devastated her."

"That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

There's also a Pakistani drama based on this novel, with title talkhiyan (تلخیاں), anyone interested can watch on YouTube.

«Ο θεός των μικρών πραγμάτων είναι η ανάποδη πλευρά αυτού που νομίζουμε ότι είναι ο Θεός. Οι άνθρωποι πιστεύουν ότι ο Θεός είναι κάτι πολύ μεγάλο, έχουν στο μυαλό τους έναν Θεό εξουσιαστή, ενώ ο θεός των μικρών πραγμάτων δεν έχει εξουσία. Είναι η φύση, η γη, τα καθημερινά πράγματα, όλα αυτά που ενώνονται και συναντούν την Ιστορία».

Είμαστε στο χωριό Αγιαμανάμ της Κεράλας στην Ινδία.
Σε μια Ινδία εξαθλιωμένη,μίζερη,φτωχή και βρόμικη που βράζει για κοινωνικές και πολιτικές αλλαγές. Για καλύτερο τρόπο ζωής,για ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα,για ειρήνη,δημοκρατία,ισότητα.

Μια συγκλονιστική και ωμή ιστορία, αληθινή και εξοργιστική,γραμμένη με λυρισμό και κοφτερή περιγραφή,τόσο έντονη και τραγική που σου δημιουργεί αποτροπιασμό και οργή.

Μια Ινδή νεαρή γυναίκα επιστρέφει στο πατρικό της μετά απο έναν αποτυχημένο γάμο μαζί με τα δίδυμα επτάχρονα παιδάκια της. Ένα αγοράκι και ένα κοριτσάκι που δεν μοιάζουν καθόλου στην εμφάνιση όμως έχουν κοινή ψυχή,κοινό μυαλό,κοινή μοίρα που τα καταδικάζει σε θύτες και θύματα παράλληλα.

Η επιστροφή στο πατρικό σπίτι και το διαζύγιο δημιουργούν σκάνδαλο και σχόλια στη σάπια κοινωνία της Ινδίας που χωρισμένη σε δυο κάστες, τους "καθαρούς" και τους "άθικτους" αποτελεί το σκηνικό της τραγωδίας.

Οι "καθαροί" είναι η ανώτερη κοινωνική τάξη, χριστιανικών αρχών και κρυμμένης σαπίλας ηθών και αξιών μέσα σε αγγλόφιλα ευρύχωρα και επιφανειακά πολιτισμένα σπίτια.

Οι "άθικτοι" είναι η κατώτερη λαϊκή μάζα. Οι ινδουιστές-κομμουνιστές της ψεύτικης και στημένης επανάστασης. Οι εργάτες-δούλοι,τα μιάσματα της κοινωνίας που απαγορεύεται ακόμη και να κοιτάξουν κάποιον "καθαρό" και επιβάλλεται να σκουπίζουν απο το δρόμο ακόμη και τα ίχνη τους μην τυχόν και διασταυρωθούν με κάποιον της καθαρής κάστας και τον μολύνουν.

Τα δίδυμα ανήκουν στην ανώτερη κάστα. Είναι σε οικογένεια "καθαρών" τίτλων και δικαιωμάτων, όμως οι ψυχές και τα πιστεύω των συγγενών τους ποτίζουν τις παιδικές ζωές με ξύδι και χολή. Επειδή τα εγκατέλειψε ο πατέρας τους, επειδή ως γυναίκα η μητέρα τους δεν αξιώνει τίποτα απο την περιουσία και την συμπόνοια των συγγενών.

Μέσα σε αυτό το περιβάλλον της γενικής εξαθλίωσης αρχίζουν και οι περιπέτειες αυτής της οικογένειας.

Απίστευτες περιγραφές,πλημμύρα συναισθημάτων,τρομερή εναλλαγή χρονικών περιόδων,εκπληκτικοί χαρακτηρες ηρώων που τους λατρεύεις και τους θαυμάζεις ή τους μισείς θανάσιμα.

Η κορύφωση της πλοκής γίνεται όταν η διαζευγμένη μητέρα των σατανικά αγγελικών διδύμων ερωτεύεται έναν "άθικτο". Έναν υπέροχο άνθρωπο που ενσαρκώνει την αγάπη και την ταπεινότητα σε ενα μεγαλείο ψυχής.

Ακολουθούν δυο θάνατοι που σημαδεύουν τα παιδιά για πάντα και γίνονται η αιτία να χωριστούν τα αδέλφια,τουλάχιστον σωματικά.


Μετά απο πολλά χρόνια και τρομερές ανατροπές της μοίρας, τα δίδυμα συναντούνται ξανά στο παλιό πατρικό.

Ήταν ξένοι μα είχαν γνωριστεί πριν αρχίσει η ζωή.


Τι να πουν; Μόνο δάκρυα υπήρχαν και φριχτή θλίψη.
Για άλλη μια φορά καταπατούν τους νόμους της αγάπης. Δεν τους έμαθε κανεις που κανονίζουν ποιος πρέπει να αγαπηθεί. Και πως...Και πόσο...

Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.

"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because Kathkali discovered long ago that the secret of Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again."- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Timing is everything regarding books, and I have to say that the timing for this book was excellent as it came to me amid my own reflections of the past, my upbringing, and personal history. This was one of the books I read at the right time and when you do read books at the right time they often hold more meaning for you. This is one of the books that had me hooked from the start. Arundhati Roy is a brilliant storyteller and I fell in love with the structure, the content of this book, the humour, the cultural reflections. This book was a reminder to me of how when I first started looking for diversity in literature, Indian literature was one of the first genres I sought and felt comfortable in despite the fact that it's not my culture. I knew I could relate to the depictions of life in the tropics, life in a former British colony with Britishness being seen as central and something to strive towards as well like I'd previously experienced was very much on my mind while reading this.

I found this to be a very compelling, beautiful, sad book, with rich imagery. The historical background was compelling. I had little knowledge of the Kerala area which was the backdrop to twins Rahel and Estha's stories but Roy managed to make the story very compelling with her discussion of Indian social issues and the history of colonialism. And it was not difficult to remember how history shapes us.

"Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones-- a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes."

I liked the non-linear storytelling and I am finding that that's true to life in many ways. Remembrances often aren't linear, and with each chapter more of the mystery is revealed and I find that to be an interesting metaphor in our own lives.

There was so much profoundness in this book, and short sentences that, despite their length, had me thinking in all sorts of directions, for example, "Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in" to depict history and rich cultural heritage being lost, and which reminds me of false histories.

The wordplay, although it did get admittedly a bit repetitive, was also interesting, and I loved so much of the imagery, especially that of the moth:

"The moth on Rahel's heart spread its velvet wings, and the chill crept into her bones."

Overall, an excellent and tragic book with unforgettable characters. Definitely worth the read.

"Both she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot--that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes."

The God of Small Things is an extraordinary achievement on all counts—a tale that tackles taboos, transgressions, and the tide of history itself; blending a lush, verdant prose style and an intricate, multi-layered narrative with exquisite grace.

Set in 1960s Kerala, the novel opens with the funeral of a 9-year-old and goes back and forth in time and place to weave together a compelling, multi-generational saga of pain, change, and preservation. And love, a force ungovernable but located tragically in the shadow of law.
And loss, which comes for us all—because of it all.

Paradise Pickles & Preserves
The central tension in The God of Small Things is one between preservation and change, be it on levels personal or political.

Somewhere close to the very beginning, we learn that Pappachi; the now-deceased patriarch of the affluent Syrian Christian family our tale is centred around; was an Imperial Entomologist, and died without recognition for the species of moth he had discovered. But pappachi's moth stands for something far greater than it seems—it is an oblique reference to the Butterfly Effect that stands as the governing logic of our world, where Small Things can, and do, lead to Big Things:

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

Successive generations of the family, too, would be similarly preoccupied with preservation, if not of insects: Pappachi's son, the Oxford-educated Marxist-with-a-feudal-libido, Chacko, makes his mother's pickles into a commercial venture that also deals in jams and jellies (and an 'illegal' banana preservative could not neatly be categorised as either—a metaphor nestled amidst many others).

Still more important, however, is the place the preservation of reputation and caste dynamics holds in this tale, and it is this that steers the lives of Ammu; Chacko's divorcee sister; and her two-egg twins Estha and Rahel, into a tragic, haunting spin. It is through the schizoid turn of events in these characters' lives that we touch upon that of the marginalised figure who is, conceptually, the focus of the tale—the titular God of Small Things, Velutha, who belongs to the oppressed Paravan (pariah) caste.

Love Laws
Roy is well-known today for wielding her pen towards activism and holding up a mirror to exploitative social realities. This is true for this book, too, an astounding literary debut if there ever was one.

“And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

The period in which The God of Small Things is set is assumed to be one of change, where constitutional rights—and in Kerala’s case, Communism—had begun to challenge the deep-set feudal, caste-based relations according to which Indian society is arranged. One of the most commendable features of Roy’s writing here is that it manages to expose the hollowness of this assumption: she uses the plot and the lives of the affluent Syrian Christian family at the story’s center to show how prejudiced caste, gender, and class dynamics retain their hold on the way live and love.

Unlike many other seemingly well-meaning upper-caste authors whose approach to addressing caste is examining the lives of the oppressed, Roy critiques the continued prejudices of the oppressors, the affluent touchable folk who are the helm of the social hierarchy. Characters like Mammachi and Baby Kochamma show that the oppressor’s attitudes towards the oppressed remain patronising and full of false generosity, where land and employment are “allowed” to the latter as long as they remain loyal to the authority of the status quo. Vellya Paapen is thus a “good” Paravan for keeping within the bounds assigned to him, while his son Velutha is seen with suspicion for demanding his rights as a worker (Even here, the ‘upper’ caste assume agency, blaming each other for allowing the untouchables “too much freedom” and consequentially "emboldening" them).

Velutha’s greatest transgression, however, is assuming true equality, and daring to love one of them. For this, and for the sake of preservation, he must be punished, never mind the fact that what he did is not criminal on any real grounds. Here, not even Comrade Pillai of the Communist Party stands by him—his loyalty, like that of the police is, after all, to his own caste, and to power.

The subjection of women is also something the author lends focus to at various points and with various characters throughout the story. The deafening, defining crescendo, however, is drawn out in the fate that awaits Ammu, who, like Velutha, will also pay for overlooking her role in the preservation of reputations and the status quo. The Love Laws work differently for her brother Chacko, of course, whose sexual appetites and liaising with ‘lower’ caste women is seen as part of his "needs"–to be humoured, and even encouraged.

There too is another set of siblings whose lives are torn asunder by the Love Laws; it is in the separation and re-union of Rahel and Estha that Roy provides us with her final piece of social comment, her last tragic metaphor.

“And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.”

n  A novel worth all the praise it has met with, and then somen

n  n  Roy's luminous debut was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997n

I'd first read this book several years ago, and could recall only the compelling prose and the faint edges of the storyline. Approaching it again at a time when I possess a better understanding of the various issue it addresses, I feel completely disarmed by its genius, its sheer immensity. The craft and complexity of it. The gorgeous, glowing, human heart of it.

This is not a book that can be adequately summarised and satisfactorily reviewed. It says a lot of Big Things, and Small Things seep through the gaps between them. It demands and commands one's attention; all of it. Read this if you haven't already.

The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, inflammable, jubilant, childlike, zygotic, hierophantic, susurrant, daemonical, yeasty, garrulous, exact, oleaginous, quaggy, kleptomaniacal, newlyminted, refulgent, blinding, xenogamic, wounding, vulpine, uncanny and taxonomical but allegedly never aleatory.

Buried under and squirreled away in the middle of this great mass of mostly (beautiful, confounding) child-eye-vision noticing and describing is a knot of connected violence (random and intended), the engorged heart of the matter, that throws various lives round as you might expect. Readers have to be patient, this is not about plot, it’s about how a writer can arrive out of nowhere and at age 35 publish a first novel that creates a bidding war then knocks everyone out and then wins the Booker Prize.

After that, by the way, there was (fictional) silence .

SOME AUTHORS WHO TOOK A WHILE TO FOLLOW UP THEIR SUCCESSFUL FIRST NOVEL

Joseph Heller – 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974)
Marilyn Robinson – 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)

And the champ

Henry Roth – 60 years (Call It Sleep 1934 to Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994)

Ms Roy is in the middle, she only took 20 years to follow up The God of Small Things with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

But back to this extraordinary book. Here’s a flavour of what you are going to get. First a description of how one character descends into muteness:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there.

But a whole lot of this book, maybe most, is seen through the eyes of two children aged seven, so we have a lot of almost Joycean weirdness like this:

Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-Dboom, Der-Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der-green, der-blueblack, dermustardyellow. Twins for tea It would bea.

And we have many, many little lists too :

Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat.
The pots and pans.
The inflatable goose.
The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes.
The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them.
Socks with separate colored toes.
Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.
A watch with the time painted on it.

SIMILEWATCH

As usual I like to spot the funny similes that authors love to heap up, it’s like some of ‘em think similes are what writing a novel is for. Here are some favorites (my own little list) :

Like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant
Like substandard mattress-stuffing
Like shining beads on an abacus
Like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been
Like lumpy knitting
Like hairy cannonballs
Like an unfriendly jewelled bear
Like sub-tropical flying-flowers
Like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing
Like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate


INDIAN WRITERS

For me they divide into the plain

R K Narayan
Rohinton Mistry
Adiga Aravind
Sunjeev Sahota
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

And the flowery

Salman Rushdie
Nadeem Aslam
Kiran Desai
And
Arundhati Roy

Which is not to say that the plain can’t turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can’t think up a decent story.

I CONFESS I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED

That The God of Small Things gets so much readerlove as it does. It’s eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won’t be everybody’s bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there’s an intricate (disrupted, fractured) sequence of events and understandings to be fitted together, and the author takes her own time.

So, I know it won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off.

I bought this viably readable novel last week and wondered why this one seemed familiar to me. Later I found out from the internet it was the 1997 winner of the Booker Prize, that is, its cover has kept haunting me since more than ten years ago and I wasn't aware of its formidable literary acclaim and honour. One of the reasons is that I've never read Arundhati Roy before since this is her debut worth reading critically and enjoyably.

I kept on reading, liked it and agreed with the review that it's her "richly textured first book" since she's described in both tragic and comic narratives with the following styles I came across:

1) Her ways of repetitive texts, echo-like for each one, for instance,
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much. (p. 328) vs.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much. (p. 33)
This implies one of the key themes - love sharing - of the novel.
2) Her shifted plot, that is, we'd find that the shameful episode at the end should've been placed somewhere before the episode of Ammu's death (p. 161), traditionally speaking.
3) Linguistically, she's revealed her knowledge and experience on language teaching/learning in Chapter 6 (Chochin Kangaroos) and other chapters [passim] of course. Therefore, reading them is amusing to me, for instance,
Margaret Kochamma told her to Stoppit.
So she Stoppited. (p. 141)
'Thang God,' Estha said.
'Thank God, Estha,' Baby Kochamma corrected him. (p. 154)

Technically, I prefer a page or more of "Glossary" of many unfamiliar Malayalam terms/words since they should help clarify general readers (I'm sorry they're Greek to me, I could guess some meanings vaguely) to better understand and more appreciate the texts related to their particular terms/words.

In brief, I think, the tragedy has been dictated by love presumably unfairly shared to the twins Estha and Rahel who have planned/executed their unthinkable adventure leading to Sophie Mol's drowning, such a ruthless, unimaginable fate to her.

I look forward to reading Arundhati Roy's new novels and other writings.

Arundhati Roy's amazing 1st novel, The God of Small Things is a richly lyrical, complexly challenging & also often frustrating tale, one that seemed far more engaging with a 2nd reading. At this point Roy has written 22 books, only 2 of them fictional works. Given that she has spent a professional career primarily writing essays & books with a political, environmental & often polemic thrust, it makes her initial novel even more impressive.



The novel touches on many themes: the caste system within India; political struggles involving competing strains of communism (Marxists vs. Maoists, or "Naxalites" in novel); family dysfunction, eastern vs. western influences; nationalism vs. regionalism; and a consideration of gender roles on the Indian subcontinent.

All of these forces are explored & fashioned into a colorful mosaic that centers on fratetrnal twins, Rahel & her brother Estha, who are at times emotionally conjoined but separated for a long period of their lives. Rahel, the younger of the twins by 8 minutes & the novel's partial narrator is impulsive but polite, seemingly friendless & expelled from 3 schools, while her brother Estha is practical, responsible & for long periods silent. The pair regard themselves as "me" when together but as "we" or "us" when apart, almost as Siamese twins who are physically separate but with joint identities, "two-egged twin hearts".

The novel is by no means linear & toggles back & forth as Rahel & Estha are separated for 23 years, beginning at age 3 when their parents divorce, while also introducing various other characters, many of them related to the twins. While Rahel goes to college & spends time in America, often working in mindless jobs, in a fractured search of her own identity, Estha withdraws from the world, becomes mute, while developing the ability to blend into the environment, to go unnoticed. Without each other’s presence & support, the twins lack congruence.

Much of the novel is set in Ayamenem, a town that has a majority Christian population within the region of Kerala, at the southwest corner of India. Because the author mixes time-frames and the characters' names are mostly unfamiliar to most readers, it takes rather a lot of work to keep the many facets of the story in perspective. I recommend composing a kind of literary roster as one reads, thus making the book somewhat less formidable. Beyond that, some of the phrasings are not translated from the local language, Malayalam, while other obscure words have to be dealt with via a dictionary &/or the Internet. With all of that, life in the region of Kerala is at the core of the story.



Because the twins are of mixed parentage with a Hindu father, Baba & a Syrian-Christian mother, Ammu, there is an additional lack of fixity for them, well beyond being raised separately. And even beyond that, their maternal great aunt, called "Baby Kochamma", dislikes the twins and feels that their mother Ammu represents a wasted life as a divorced woman in India. Ammu has fled her drunken husband for Ayamenem in Kerala "to live in the penumbral shadows between 2 worlds." And, it is said that Rahel & Estha "were trapped in the bog of a story that was & wasn't their own.
They had set out with the semblance of structure & order, then bolted like a frightened horse into anarchy." And with that:

Something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind & demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy & contained, private & limited) came away cauterized, laughing nimbly at his own temerity. Nothing much mattered. Worse things had happened in the country, poised forever between the terror of war & the horror of peace. Worse things kept happening.

As an example of the often very striking prose, there is a scene when the reunited twins go to the airport to meet their 1st cousin Sophie Mol, arriving via a flight from London. Their cousin is the daughter of an uncle named “Chako”, a former Rhodes Scholar, whose marriage to a British woman had dissolved…

In the doorway of the Arrivals Lounge, a shadowy, red-mouthed, roo-shaped silhouette waved a cement paw only at Rahel. Cement kisses whirred through the air like small helicopters. The three of them sashayed across the airport car park, swaying like fashion models, Eagle flasks & Made-in-England go-go bags bumping against their hips. Damp dwarfs walking tall. Shadows followed them. Silver jets in a blue church sky, like moths in a beam of light.

So very much of the story involves illicit love--between the twin's mother Ammu and a Dalit or "untouchable" named Velutha and also late in the novel between the twins themselves, a kind of incestuous grasping, a quest for identity by each of these 4 souls. Velutha, called a Paravan (Malayalam for "untouchable") in Roy's novel, loves the twins & is beloved by them. He is probably the most centered character in the book and he has to pay a rather stiff price for breaking India's intractable "love laws".



For as Velutha & Ammu make love every night for 14 nights near the river, they realize that their bond is doomed. And so,

they instinctively stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So, they stuck to the Small Things. They laughed at ant bites on each other's bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves, at overturned beetles that couldn't right themselves. And particularly at the minute spider who lived in a crack in the wall of the back of the verandah & camouflaged himself by covering his exterior with bits of rubbish, calling him "Lord Rubbish". Without admitting it to each other, they linked their fates, their futures, their love, their hopes, their infinite joy, to his.

The lovers realize that the tiny spider will very likely outlive their love for each other. In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, certain images loom large, that of the spider and also the recurrent image of a moth, small things indeed looming large and what is left unsaid often having a greater impact than what is spoken.

There is inclusion of an art form called Kathakali, a particular type of dance performance in Kerala with ornate costumes, a bit like Japanese Noh Theater, wherein the performers transform themselves into Indian gods and “relate great stories about who lives, who dies, who finds love & who doesn’t”. The Kathakali man can “reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains, the hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory. And, while he tells stories of the gods, “his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart”. It is said that the secret of these great stories is that they have no secrets.



Beyond this memorable tableau of South India, my sense of the novel is that the twins, Rahel & Estha, might be considered as a single entity, a metaphor for different aspects of one personality, in search of itself.

And while the novel may seem discursive, that is perhaps because the author means to portray memory, much like dreams occurring in non-linear fashion. Reading Roy's remarkable novel is not without complications, including the non-linear sequence & fantastical occurrences aplenty but the presence of very expressive language lift The God of Small Things to a realm well beyond the ordinary, making it well worth reading, and even rereading.

*Within my review, among my inserted images are one of the author, Arundhati Roy; another portraying life on an inland waterway within Kerala; Dalits at protest; and lastly, a performance within Kerala of the dance form called Kathakali. **I heard Ms. Roy speak locally & sign books just after her 2nd novel appeared.