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袘芯谐褗褌 薪邪 写褉械斜薪懈褌械 薪械褖邪
鈥炐懶拘逞娧� 薪邪 写褉械斜薪懈褌械 薪械褖邪鈥� 械 褉芯屑邪薪 褋 屑芯褖械薪 懈 薪械芯斜懈泻薪芯胁械薪 谐谢邪褋, 泻芯泄褌芯 芯褋褌邪胁邪 写邪 泻褗薪褌懈 胁 褋褗蟹薪邪薪懈械褌芯 薪邪 褔懈褌邪褌械谢褟. 袛械泄褋褌胁懈械褌芯 褋械 褉邪蟹胁懈胁邪 锌褉械写懈屑薪芯 胁 袣械褉邪谢邪, 袠薪写懈褟 锌褉械蟹 1969 谐芯写懈薪邪 懈 褉邪蟹泻邪蟹胁邪 懈褋褌芯褉懈褟褌邪 薪邪 袪邪褏械谢 懈 薪械泄薪懈褟褌 斜褉邪褌-斜谢懈蟹薪邪泻 袝褋褌邪, 泻芯懈褌芯 薪邪褍褔邪胁邪褌, 褔械 褑械谢懈褟褌 懈屑 褋胁褟褌 屑芯卸械 写邪 褋械 锌褉芯屑械薪懈 蟹邪 械写懈薪 械写懈薪褋褌胁械薪 写械薪, 邪 谢褞斜芯胁褌邪 懈 卸懈胁芯褌邪 屑芯谐邪褌 写邪 斜褗写邪褌 锌芯谐褍斜械薪懈 蟹邪 屑懈谐. 袙褗芯褉褗卸械薪懈 褋邪屑芯 褋 薪械褋褗泻褉褍褕懈屑邪褌邪 褋懈 写械褌褋泻邪 薪械胁懈薪薪芯褋褌, 褌械 褋械 芯锌懈褌胁邪褌 写邪 褋懈 蟹邪锌邪蟹褟褌 泻褗褌褔械 写械褌褋褌胁芯 胁褋褉械写 褉邪蟹胁邪谢懈薪懈褌械 薪邪 褋胁芯械褌芯 褋械屑械泄褋褌胁芯. 小褗褉褑械褉邪蟹写懈褉邪褌械谢械薪 懈 屑懈谢, 薪芯 胁 褋褗褖芯褌芯 胁褉械屑械 褑懈薪懈褔械薪 懈 写褗谢斜芯泻 褉芯屑邪薪, 泻芯泄褌芯 蟹邪褋谢褍卸邪胁邪 写邪 斜褗写械 锌芯褋褌邪胁械薪 褉械写芯屑 写芯 褌胁芯褉斜懈褌械 薪邪 小邪谢屑邪薪 袪褍褕写懈 懈 袚邪斜褉懈械谢 袚邪褉褋懈褟 袦邪褉泻械褋.
384 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1997
19k people are currently reading
308k people want to read
About the author
Arundhati Roy
115听books12.5k听followersArundhati Roy is an Indian writer who is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 21,103 reviews
December 9, 2020
Honestly, I wanted to like this one SO much but it was terrible.
That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
The novel follows a multi-generational Indian family in 1969.
The matriarch, Mammachi, is their abused and blind grandmother. Ammu is the weary mother of fraternal twins, Esthappen and Rahel.
The twins' favorite uncle, Chacko, brings his white wife over for Christmas, the twins immediately fall in love with their cousin - only to realize just how quickly life can change.
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.That good things become bad, in an instant.
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.This book is one of the Important Novels - the ones that get talked about over and over about how Significant and Essential they are for reading...and much like many Important Novels , I just didn't enjoy it.
Now, the last time I didn't like an Important Novel (*cough* *cough* Animal Farm), I was besieged with comments about how I was too stupid to understand the novel (I will maintain, at least in that novel's case, that "getting it" and "liking it" are two entirely separate things. I didn't like Animal Farm. Period.).
However, for The God of Small Things, I honestly don't know if I didn't like it because it was bad or if I just didn't get it. I couldn't follow a thing.
The timeline was disjointed, often skipping ahead followed by flashbacks, so I felt disoriented and disgruntled much of the time.
The prose was overly complicated and tiresome to read. I love beautiful language and elegant metaphors... but this one had so much of both that it would sometimes take pages to figure out a single subtle point.
The characters felt more like snapshots rather than fully fleshed out characters. So much metaphor time, absolutely no character development.
And, in general, the plot was one giant grey mess. Did something happen? Was it significant? Or was it just humans being garbage people to each other?
This seems to happen a lot with critically acclaimed books - people love it, but without that badge or sticker of approval, I don't really think it would be so popular.
Ultimately, it's one very confused star. Not a fan of this one.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a huge audiobook fan, so I picked up the audio version. Maybe I shouldn't have?| | | | | Snapchat @miranda_reads
I kept getting confused (this novel (to me) was difficult to follow via audiobook, even when I repeated the beginning 3xs) so perhaps if I had read it the book would've felt less disjointed and I would have enjoyed it significantly more.
But I'm not feeling up for a reread, so my review will stand as is.
August 10, 2015
Okay, first things first. The God Of Small Things is a very very clever book, but what makes it exceptional is that it is both beautiful and crafty, a rare combination. This book has structure. Lots of it. She effectively creates a language of her own, a juvenile lucid language which complements the wistful mood of the book beautifully. The plot moves around in space and time with masterful ease and one can't help but experience a vague sense of foreboding, a prickly fear in the back of your neck.
From what could have been just another tragic incident, Arundhati Roy weaves a poignant story about the loss of innocence and the far-reaching devastation caused in the aftermath of one tragic event. She examines every character with a genuine warmth, their motivations, insecurities and most importantly, their unfulfilled dreams, the definitive universal human tragedy.
'The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.' Voltaire said. This book is an appropriate example of how true that adage is. Like a loving mother with only one piece of pie, she withholds information and doles it out at the most opportune moments, yet never does the plot become incomprehensible. In fact, we lap it all up and can't wait for the next serving. To even attempt to summarize the plot would be to take everything away from it because, well, surprise!, the book really is about the Small Things. And the Really Big Things.
On one level the book is about freespirited Ammu, our very own Madame Bovary. It's about Rahel and Estha, Ammu's twin children, their innocent childhood infringements and the soarings and stiflings of their little hearts, their complex entwined lives which are governed by the Love Laws, that lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much. And how long.
On another level, it's about the idea of men being social constructs. About our lives not really being in our hands. About our lives really being governed by the forces of the invisible big bad things, a sadistic child holding a horshoe magnet to the disparate iron filings of our small, insiginificant lives. In short, a History lesson. A lesson in Indian caste dynamics and the communist movement of Kerala. About how the Really Big Things often seep into the Small Things, like tea from a teabag.
What hurts the most is not the intensity of the characters' suffering, but the fact that it is extremely commonplace, their suffering, like labour pains, like the food chain. An Indian food chain tragedy, based on caste and other offerings History left behind in it's wake. It demonstrates how all caste-based violence is ecological, based on fear, the strange fear the powerful have for the powerless. Us and them.
At the end of it, what I got from the book (I think) was that though the Really Big Things might be really fucked up, most of the times the Small Things more than make up for it. Really.
From what could have been just another tragic incident, Arundhati Roy weaves a poignant story about the loss of innocence and the far-reaching devastation caused in the aftermath of one tragic event. She examines every character with a genuine warmth, their motivations, insecurities and most importantly, their unfulfilled dreams, the definitive universal human tragedy.
'The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.' Voltaire said. This book is an appropriate example of how true that adage is. Like a loving mother with only one piece of pie, she withholds information and doles it out at the most opportune moments, yet never does the plot become incomprehensible. In fact, we lap it all up and can't wait for the next serving. To even attempt to summarize the plot would be to take everything away from it because, well, surprise!, the book really is about the Small Things. And the Really Big Things.
On one level the book is about freespirited Ammu, our very own Madame Bovary. It's about Rahel and Estha, Ammu's twin children, their innocent childhood infringements and the soarings and stiflings of their little hearts, their complex entwined lives which are governed by the Love Laws, that lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much. And how long.
On another level, it's about the idea of men being social constructs. About our lives not really being in our hands. About our lives really being governed by the forces of the invisible big bad things, a sadistic child holding a horshoe magnet to the disparate iron filings of our small, insiginificant lives. In short, a History lesson. A lesson in Indian caste dynamics and the communist movement of Kerala. About how the Really Big Things often seep into the Small Things, like tea from a teabag.
What hurts the most is not the intensity of the characters' suffering, but the fact that it is extremely commonplace, their suffering, like labour pains, like the food chain. An Indian food chain tragedy, based on caste and other offerings History left behind in it's wake. It demonstrates how all caste-based violence is ecological, based on fear, the strange fear the powerful have for the powerless. Us and them.
At the end of it, what I got from the book (I think) was that though the Really Big Things might be really fucked up, most of the times the Small Things more than make up for it. Really.
July 29, 2020
This review is going to be a short one because that鈥檚 what happens when almost two months pass after I read the book. I avoided this novel for years although I knew it was a modern classic. I read that it was pretentious and confusing due to its nonlinear structure. I also had the impression it will be very long and similar to The Midnight Children (did not enjoy that one), only written by a woman. Some said that it is the worst Booker Winner. I am happy to report that none of my fears proved to be true. It was a very fast read, not that pretentious and with just a bit of attention I did not have any problems differentiating between the timelines. So, what I am trying to say, if you are also reluctant to read this, don鈥檛 be.
The prose is masterful and the story is heartbreaking. I know, I am oversensitive to stories about twins but still, it is hard to remain unmoved. It is a story about the injustice of caste-phobia, a problem still prevalent in modern India. It is a story about love, between siblings, between parents and children, between lovers. It is a story of loss, separation, revenge and injustice. There are so many excellent reviews out there that discuss this novel in detail and all of its themes that it is impossible for me to add anything new. I will only say that the novel made me feel a lot and I count on the fingers of one hand the books that affected me so much recently.
The prose is masterful and the story is heartbreaking. I know, I am oversensitive to stories about twins but still, it is hard to remain unmoved. It is a story about the injustice of caste-phobia, a problem still prevalent in modern India. It is a story about love, between siblings, between parents and children, between lovers. It is a story of loss, separation, revenge and injustice. There are so many excellent reviews out there that discuss this novel in detail and all of its themes that it is impossible for me to add anything new. I will only say that the novel made me feel a lot and I count on the fingers of one hand the books that affected me so much recently.
October 29, 2023
Small Perfection.
1969-93, Kerala, India. Rahel and Estha are two estranged early adult siblings, reunited again after decades apart. Rahel, vivacious, outspoken, and working hard abroad; Estha reclusive, near mute, and never far off home. As they fumblingly attempt to reconnect, flashbacks from the past come back and forth, revealing the history and tragedy of a once united family, that now is not.
This was one weird f*cked up book, and still one of the best I鈥檝e ever read. The God of Small Things weaves the story of two generations, from parents Ammu and Pappachi, to their descendants, Rahel and Esthappen. A family鈥檚 history written in tiny glimpses of joy, and ill-fated events; scarred with terrible familiar and societal injustices, and fleeting moments of happiness, in a world prone to swiftly crush them. The story of Pappachi, Ammu, Velutha, Chako and Baby Kochamma taking a major role in the plot progression, and the unfolding chain of events.
To be honest after five years I hardly remember anything at all. It鈥檚 not the stuff is forgettable, I actually think it鈥檚 pretty memorable, in fact much of it's just atrocious and I wish I could forget it. The story is so f*cked up in so many ways, with heavy TW written all over the place. But tbh I couldn鈥檛 care less; what I absolutely LOVE about this book has nothing to do with the plot or its characters, but Arundhati Roy's style of writing. I just fell madly in love with it.
Reading this book was like watching an infinitely intricate spider web connecting every single little detail. Like Pappachi's Moth, and so many other seemingly trivial things. But ordinary things that kept repeating themselves again and again, in so many unique and different ways. Creating a world of new concepts out of thin air, exquisitely recrafting small tiny events, and weaving all of them together in this tragic little universe.
I must confess the idea of becoming a writer has appealed to me once or twice, although doubt it鈥檒l ever happen, since I鈥檓 fully aware of my appalling absence of consistency and habit, not to mention maybe the skill lacking. But if I鈥檓 ever to become one, this is how I want to do it, or at last attempt to; because what Arundhati Roy did here, her style of writing, was for me divine perfection, and to nail it on her debut novel, beyond exceptional.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1997] [321p] [Fiction] [Historical] [Conditional Recommendable]
-----------------------------------------------
Peque帽a Perfecci贸n.
1969-93, Kerala, India. Rahel y Estha son dos hermanos j贸venes adultos distanciados, reunidos de nuevo luego de d茅cadas separados. Rahel, vivaz, abierta, y trabajando duro afuera; Estha recluso, casi mudo, y nunca de su casa lejos. Mientas intentan lastimosamente reconectarse, flashes del pasado entran y salen, revelando la historia y tragedia de una familia alguna vez unida, que ahora ya no sea.
Este fue un jodidamente raro libro, y aun as铆 uno de los mejores que jam谩s he le铆do. El Dios de las Peque帽as cosas teje una historia de dos generaciones, desde los padres Ammu y Pappachi, hasta sus descendientes, Rahel y Esthappen. La historia de una familia escrita en peque帽os destellos de felicidad, y eventos desafortunados; cicatrizados con terribles injusticias, familiares y sociales, y fugaces momentos de alegr铆a, en un mundo propenso a r谩pidamente destruirla. La historia de Pappachi, Ammu, Velutha, Chako y Baby Kochamma tomando un rol preponderante en la progresi贸n de la trama, y en el desenlace de los eventos que desencadena.
Para ser honestos despu茅s de cinco a帽os apenas si recuerdo en absoluto algo. No es que las cosas sean olvidables, de hecho creo que son bastante memorables, en verdad mucho de ello es horrible y desear铆a poder olvidarlo. La historia es jodida en varias formas, con poderosas alarmas en partes todas. Pero para ser sinceros eso no podr铆a importarme menos; lo que absolutamente AMO de este libro no tienen nada que ver con la trama o sus personajes, sino m谩s bien con la escritura de Arundhati Roy. Simplemente me enamor茅 perdidamente de ella.
Leer este libro fue como observar una infinitamente intrincada telara帽a conectando cada peque帽o detalle. Como la Polilla de Pappachi, y varias otras aparentemente triviales cosas. Pero ordinarias cosas que se repet铆an una y otra vez, en tantas diferentes y 煤nicas formas. Creando un mundo de nuevos conceptos desde la nada, exquisitamente reformulando peque帽os diminutos eventos, y tejiendo juntos todos ellos, en este tr谩gico y peque帽o universo.
Debo confesar que la idea de convertirme en autor me apeteci贸 en alguna que otra ocasi贸n, aunque dudo que alguna vez suceda, ya que soy plenamente consciente de mi vergonzosa ausencia de h谩bito y consistencia, sin mencionar la habilidad tal vez en carencia. Pero si alguna vez en uno me convierto, 茅sta es la forma en que quiero hacerlo, o al menos intentarlo; porque lo que Arundhati Roy logr贸 aqu铆, su estilo de escritura, fue para m铆 perfecci贸n divina, y algo excepcional, el lograrlo con su novela primera.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1997] [321p] [Ficci贸n] [Hist贸rica] [Recomendable Condicional]
-----------------------------------------------
1969-93, Kerala, India. Rahel and Estha are two estranged early adult siblings, reunited again after decades apart. Rahel, vivacious, outspoken, and working hard abroad; Estha reclusive, near mute, and never far off home. As they fumblingly attempt to reconnect, flashbacks from the past come back and forth, revealing the history and tragedy of a once united family, that now is not.
This was one weird f*cked up book, and still one of the best I鈥檝e ever read. The God of Small Things weaves the story of two generations, from parents Ammu and Pappachi, to their descendants, Rahel and Esthappen. A family鈥檚 history written in tiny glimpses of joy, and ill-fated events; scarred with terrible familiar and societal injustices, and fleeting moments of happiness, in a world prone to swiftly crush them. The story of Pappachi, Ammu, Velutha, Chako and Baby Kochamma taking a major role in the plot progression, and the unfolding chain of events.
To be honest after five years I hardly remember anything at all. It鈥檚 not the stuff is forgettable, I actually think it鈥檚 pretty memorable, in fact much of it's just atrocious and I wish I could forget it. The story is so f*cked up in so many ways, with heavy TW written all over the place. But tbh I couldn鈥檛 care less; what I absolutely LOVE about this book has nothing to do with the plot or its characters, but Arundhati Roy's style of writing. I just fell madly in love with it.
Reading this book was like watching an infinitely intricate spider web connecting every single little detail. Like Pappachi's Moth, and so many other seemingly trivial things. But ordinary things that kept repeating themselves again and again, in so many unique and different ways. Creating a world of new concepts out of thin air, exquisitely recrafting small tiny events, and weaving all of them together in this tragic little universe.
I must confess the idea of becoming a writer has appealed to me once or twice, although doubt it鈥檒l ever happen, since I鈥檓 fully aware of my appalling absence of consistency and habit, not to mention maybe the skill lacking. But if I鈥檓 ever to become one, this is how I want to do it, or at last attempt to; because what Arundhati Roy did here, her style of writing, was for me divine perfection, and to nail it on her debut novel, beyond exceptional.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1997] [321p] [Fiction] [Historical] [Conditional Recommendable]
-----------------------------------------------
Peque帽a Perfecci贸n.
1969-93, Kerala, India. Rahel y Estha son dos hermanos j贸venes adultos distanciados, reunidos de nuevo luego de d茅cadas separados. Rahel, vivaz, abierta, y trabajando duro afuera; Estha recluso, casi mudo, y nunca de su casa lejos. Mientas intentan lastimosamente reconectarse, flashes del pasado entran y salen, revelando la historia y tragedia de una familia alguna vez unida, que ahora ya no sea.
Este fue un jodidamente raro libro, y aun as铆 uno de los mejores que jam谩s he le铆do. El Dios de las Peque帽as cosas teje una historia de dos generaciones, desde los padres Ammu y Pappachi, hasta sus descendientes, Rahel y Esthappen. La historia de una familia escrita en peque帽os destellos de felicidad, y eventos desafortunados; cicatrizados con terribles injusticias, familiares y sociales, y fugaces momentos de alegr铆a, en un mundo propenso a r谩pidamente destruirla. La historia de Pappachi, Ammu, Velutha, Chako y Baby Kochamma tomando un rol preponderante en la progresi贸n de la trama, y en el desenlace de los eventos que desencadena.
Para ser honestos despu茅s de cinco a帽os apenas si recuerdo en absoluto algo. No es que las cosas sean olvidables, de hecho creo que son bastante memorables, en verdad mucho de ello es horrible y desear铆a poder olvidarlo. La historia es jodida en varias formas, con poderosas alarmas en partes todas. Pero para ser sinceros eso no podr铆a importarme menos; lo que absolutamente AMO de este libro no tienen nada que ver con la trama o sus personajes, sino m谩s bien con la escritura de Arundhati Roy. Simplemente me enamor茅 perdidamente de ella.
Leer este libro fue como observar una infinitamente intrincada telara帽a conectando cada peque帽o detalle. Como la Polilla de Pappachi, y varias otras aparentemente triviales cosas. Pero ordinarias cosas que se repet铆an una y otra vez, en tantas diferentes y 煤nicas formas. Creando un mundo de nuevos conceptos desde la nada, exquisitamente reformulando peque帽os diminutos eventos, y tejiendo juntos todos ellos, en este tr谩gico y peque帽o universo.
Debo confesar que la idea de convertirme en autor me apeteci贸 en alguna que otra ocasi贸n, aunque dudo que alguna vez suceda, ya que soy plenamente consciente de mi vergonzosa ausencia de h谩bito y consistencia, sin mencionar la habilidad tal vez en carencia. Pero si alguna vez en uno me convierto, 茅sta es la forma en que quiero hacerlo, o al menos intentarlo; porque lo que Arundhati Roy logr贸 aqu铆, su estilo de escritura, fue para m铆 perfecci贸n divina, y algo excepcional, el lograrlo con su novela primera.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1997] [321p] [Ficci贸n] [Hist贸rica] [Recomendable Condicional]
-----------------------------------------------
April 9, 2008
Lush, gorgeous prose: reading The God of Small Things is like having your arms and legs tied to a slowly moving, possibly dying horse, and being dragged face-down through the jungle. I mean, like that, only nice. You can't stop seeing and smelling everything, and it's all so foreign and rich. Potentially ripe with e coli.
The similes and metaphors Roy employs are simultaneously tactile and surreal, like an overly vivid dream, and her storytelling style is somewhere between Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, and Pilgrim's Progress (if you actually read That Particular Gem). Key sentences reappear a few chapters later multiple times throughout the book: the main one, of course, being "Everything can change in the course of a day." And if you're going to repeat a sentence multiple times in a book, that's certainly not a bad one.
The one thing that makes me hesitant to go all out with the five stars is the whole backwards plot development thing. At least early on in the book, it struck me as a little gimmicky, especially since the end result is so dramatic. Estha doesn't talk any more. Why doesn't Estha talk any more? Something must have happened to him. When did it happen to him? As a child, something very bad happened to him as a child. You're probably wondering what that is now, right? Well now let's talk about his aunt. He's got a mom too. This is what their garden is like. Hey, remember Estha, that kid you're wondering about? Yeah, something definitely happened to him as a kid. Keep reading, suckers!
But I shouldn't say that, because, of course, it turns out you're not a sucker for reading this book, and the joke is on me for ever thinking so in the first place.
The similes and metaphors Roy employs are simultaneously tactile and surreal, like an overly vivid dream, and her storytelling style is somewhere between Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, and Pilgrim's Progress (if you actually read That Particular Gem). Key sentences reappear a few chapters later multiple times throughout the book: the main one, of course, being "Everything can change in the course of a day." And if you're going to repeat a sentence multiple times in a book, that's certainly not a bad one.
The one thing that makes me hesitant to go all out with the five stars is the whole backwards plot development thing. At least early on in the book, it struck me as a little gimmicky, especially since the end result is so dramatic. Estha doesn't talk any more. Why doesn't Estha talk any more? Something must have happened to him. When did it happen to him? As a child, something very bad happened to him as a child. You're probably wondering what that is now, right? Well now let's talk about his aunt. He's got a mom too. This is what their garden is like. Hey, remember Estha, that kid you're wondering about? Yeah, something definitely happened to him as a kid. Keep reading, suckers!
But I shouldn't say that, because, of course, it turns out you're not a sucker for reading this book, and the joke is on me for ever thinking so in the first place.
December 30, 2021
Arundhati Roy - image from Slate
This is a wonderful, image-rich novel told over several generations of a family in India. The central event is the death of a young girl, and how racism, and petty, CYA politics, results in the death of an innocent for a crime that was never committed. The central character is a girl/woman, a twin, with an almost surreal connection to her other. Their family life is told. There is much here on Indian history, the caste system and how that continues to manifest in the modern world. It won the Booker prize, and is very satisfying.
August 9, 2013
I'm all by myself here, but what the hell.
This reads like a graduate writing class exercise blown from 20 pages to 300. The metaphors, while occasionally fresh and unexpected, are tedious and frequently stand in for something that could be much less complex. The writing is self-conscious and precious. There is really no good reason to tell the story in such a disjointed fashion. Roy's attempts to recreate the way children view the world were cute for about 10 pages, and then became tiresome (there's a reason children don't write novels). Beautiful insights and revelations are buried beneath so much willful density and elaboration that I was just bored. Too much effort, too little editing.
This reads like a graduate writing class exercise blown from 20 pages to 300. The metaphors, while occasionally fresh and unexpected, are tedious and frequently stand in for something that could be much less complex. The writing is self-conscious and precious. There is really no good reason to tell the story in such a disjointed fashion. Roy's attempts to recreate the way children view the world were cute for about 10 pages, and then became tiresome (there's a reason children don't write novels). Beautiful insights and revelations are buried beneath so much willful density and elaboration that I was just bored. Too much effort, too little editing.
October 30, 2007
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.
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.
December 25, 2016
It is 1969 and India although having achieved independence twenty years earlier is still mired in its caste system. In this light, Arundhati Roy brings us her masterful first novel The G-D of Small Things which won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. A powerful novel filled with luscious prose and a heart rending story, Roy reveals to her readers an India hanging onto to the traditions of the past with a slight glimpse of her future.
Ammukutty Kochamma, the daughter of a respected entomologist and classical violin player, desired an education rather than an arranged marriage. Her family belonged to the Touchable caste and, while tolerable of others, desired that their daughter married someone from a family like theirs. Ammu met a Bengali and married for love. He turned out to be an alcoholic and they divorced within two years, although not before giving birth to fraternal twins Estahappen (Esta) a boy and Rahel a girl. Ammu retreats with her children to the family estate, doomed to live a miserable life as an outcast.
Even though Ammu raises Esta and Rahel to be brilliant children, the rest of the family resents their presence at the home in Ayemenem. Her father has died and her mother, although a presence, is blind. The new head of the family is her brother Chacko, a former Rhodes Scholar and current member of the communist party. Although he attempts to be a father to the twins, his pseudo-love pines for his biological daughter Sophie Mol who lives in England. While Chacko tolerates the family, Ammu's aunt Baby Kochamma spews nothing but venom at Ammu and her children for the rest of her life. Failed at both becoming a nun and winning over her true love in life, Baby Kochamma desires nothing more than to make all those around her miserable, but especially her divorced niece Ammu and two bastard children.
Roy merited the Booker prize for her story alone as it featured forbidden love within the caste system and memorable, multi-layered characters. Yet, what most likely won Roy this award was her masterful prose, which, when combined with her tale, results in an instant classic. Switching from current time to flashbacks, speaking backwards in twin language, and detailed descriptions of Indian life are only a few of the facets contributing to this tale. Adding to the prose the tragic tale of twins separated, a woman denied love because he belongs to another untouchable caste, and other characters pining for a life that might have been, Roy has woven together a true gem.
Recently I joined the year of reading women of color challenge, which lead me to read novels by female authors around the globe who I would not have considered otherwise. Arundhati Roy is a gifted storyteller and film writer, whose work should not be missed. Her second novel The Ministry of Upmost Happiness is due out in July 2017. If it is nearly as masterful as The G-D of Small Things, it is a novel that should not be missed. A luscious, complex novel worthy of its awards, The G-D of Small Things merits 5 sparkling stars.
Ammukutty Kochamma, the daughter of a respected entomologist and classical violin player, desired an education rather than an arranged marriage. Her family belonged to the Touchable caste and, while tolerable of others, desired that their daughter married someone from a family like theirs. Ammu met a Bengali and married for love. He turned out to be an alcoholic and they divorced within two years, although not before giving birth to fraternal twins Estahappen (Esta) a boy and Rahel a girl. Ammu retreats with her children to the family estate, doomed to live a miserable life as an outcast.
Even though Ammu raises Esta and Rahel to be brilliant children, the rest of the family resents their presence at the home in Ayemenem. Her father has died and her mother, although a presence, is blind. The new head of the family is her brother Chacko, a former Rhodes Scholar and current member of the communist party. Although he attempts to be a father to the twins, his pseudo-love pines for his biological daughter Sophie Mol who lives in England. While Chacko tolerates the family, Ammu's aunt Baby Kochamma spews nothing but venom at Ammu and her children for the rest of her life. Failed at both becoming a nun and winning over her true love in life, Baby Kochamma desires nothing more than to make all those around her miserable, but especially her divorced niece Ammu and two bastard children.
Roy merited the Booker prize for her story alone as it featured forbidden love within the caste system and memorable, multi-layered characters. Yet, what most likely won Roy this award was her masterful prose, which, when combined with her tale, results in an instant classic. Switching from current time to flashbacks, speaking backwards in twin language, and detailed descriptions of Indian life are only a few of the facets contributing to this tale. Adding to the prose the tragic tale of twins separated, a woman denied love because he belongs to another untouchable caste, and other characters pining for a life that might have been, Roy has woven together a true gem.
Recently I joined the year of reading women of color challenge, which lead me to read novels by female authors around the globe who I would not have considered otherwise. Arundhati Roy is a gifted storyteller and film writer, whose work should not be missed. Her second novel The Ministry of Upmost Happiness is due out in July 2017. If it is nearly as masterful as The G-D of Small Things, it is a novel that should not be missed. A luscious, complex novel worthy of its awards, The G-D of Small Things merits 5 sparkling stars.
September 17, 2022
鈥淎s she leaned against the door in the darkness, [Ammu] felt her dream, her Afternoon-mare, move inside her like a rib of water rising from the ocean, gathering into a wave. The cheerful one-armed man with salty skin and a shoulder that ended abruptly like a cliff emerged from the shadows of the jagged beach and walked towards her.
Who was he?
Who could he have been?
The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.
The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he touched her, he couldn鈥檛 talk to her, if he loved her he couldn鈥檛 leave, if he spoke he couldn鈥檛 listen, if he fought he couldn鈥檛 win鈥︹€�
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Over the years, the lofty reputations of literature鈥檚 great novels can work against them. By the time you get to certain classics, there is almost no way they can live up to the hype that precedes them. But that is not the case with Arundhati Roy鈥檚 The God of Small Things. The controversial Booker Prize winner has talons as sharp as the day it came off the printing presses in 1997. It is brutal and beautiful, challenging and discomforting, a book of precise insights, moral force, and emotional impact.
***
The God of Small Things is difficult to summarize without overexplaining or spoiling its revelations. Suffice to say, Roy鈥檚 novel revolves around two tragic incidents that occur to two different children. Both of these moments are given to the reader up front, with the narrative itself only gradually circling back to them.
This technique works quite effectively. As Alfred Hitchcock used to explain, there is a fine distinction between surprise and suspense, and Roy understands it well. Though she tells you what鈥檚 coming down the road, she builds an enormous amount of tension is showing exactly how those distant points are reached. Roy executes so well that even her non-surprises are shocking.
***
The most important thing to know in approaching The God of Small Things is its structure, which can be a bit of a challenge. The story takes place in two different timelines. The first 鈥� and main 鈥� timeline is in 1969, where the important stuff happens. The second is in 1993, where the characters are still reeling, nearly a quarter century later.
Additionally, the 1969 story-thread is nonlinear, with both forwards and backwards temporal leaps. While Roy is not deliberately trying to confuse things 鈥� all these fractured pieces eventually fall into place in meaningful ways 鈥� you have to pay careful attention to the transitions. It took me a minute, but once I understood what to look for 鈥� once I knew where the plot was headed 鈥� everything made a lot more sense. I say this because The God of Small Things has a bit of a learning curve imbedded within it.
***
Our main characters are Rahel (a girl) and Esthappen (a boy), who are seven-year-old fraternal twins in 1969. They live in the village of Ayemenem in southwestern India, cared for by their single mother, Ammu, who has found herself cornered by life since she divorced her husband.
Ammu鈥檚 family owns a pickling factory, the control of which has been seized by Rahel and Esthappen鈥檚 Oxford-educated Uncle Chako. He was once married to an Englishwoman named Margaret, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie. The precipitating event in The God of Small Things is the visit of Margaret and Sophie to Ayemenem.
Roy鈥檚 handling of these people 鈥� and many more 鈥� is simply astounding. Everyone who walks across the stage gets their due. More than that, everyone is given dimension. There are some nasty folks in these pages, but all of that nastiness is earned. For example, Rahel and Esthappen have a hateful great-aunt known as Baby Kochamma. A thoroughgoing heel, she is also surprisingly sympathetic, given a fully-formed 鈥� and engrossing 鈥� backstory that explains how she came to be what she is, and how she came to do what she does. Even the archetypal police inspector, an officious jerk with just a passing role, is allowed a hint of shading as the cog of a machine.
To encompass this small universe, Roy employs an omniscient third-person perspective, in which she delves into the lives and innermost thoughts of just about everyone who appears on the page. By shifting perspectives at just the right time, though, she still manages to hold back several bombshells until late in the final act.
***
The prose is something else. It is lyrical and lush and evocative. Roy uses the lost art of the simile to marvelous effect, and has the ability to describe things with such tactility that to read this book is to feel like you鈥檝e seen a movie. From an airy church to a dingy airport, from a dusty road to a gaudy movie house, Roy creates incredibly detailed sets for her dramatic moments, making them an integral part of her scenes.
Roy pulls no punches in her writing, however, and this caused something of a backlash upon publication, and ever since. In particular, there is an unsparing depiction of a sexual assault in which she refuses to look away. The hideousness, the queasiness, are obviously the point 鈥� I did not sense any cheap, attention-seeking gratuity 鈥� and she lands the blows, but it鈥檚 also hard to read. Beyond that, there is a rawness and frankness to The God of Small Things that can be startling.
***
The God of Small Things is bursting with motifs, and Roy sets them out boldly. Some derive from the particulars of India, especially caste segregation dividing Touchables from Untouchables. Others, such as misogyny, betrayal, manipulation, and thwarted love, are universal.
In a lesser novel, this sort of thematic underlining could be pedantic, even trite. But the power of Roy鈥檚 writing, the vividness of her thorny, conflicted characters, and the intensity of the book鈥檚 climactic incidents give meaning to otherwise well-worn sentiments. Ammu, Rahel, and Esthappen are hopelessly stuck in the slipstream of history and society, unable to control the larger things, and left to cling to those brief handholds of joy. Death is the cost of life, and the riddle that animates The God of Small Things is figuring out how to make that steep price worth paying.
Who was he?
Who could he have been?
The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.
The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he touched her, he couldn鈥檛 talk to her, if he loved her he couldn鈥檛 leave, if he spoke he couldn鈥檛 listen, if he fought he couldn鈥檛 win鈥︹€�
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Over the years, the lofty reputations of literature鈥檚 great novels can work against them. By the time you get to certain classics, there is almost no way they can live up to the hype that precedes them. But that is not the case with Arundhati Roy鈥檚 The God of Small Things. The controversial Booker Prize winner has talons as sharp as the day it came off the printing presses in 1997. It is brutal and beautiful, challenging and discomforting, a book of precise insights, moral force, and emotional impact.
***
The God of Small Things is difficult to summarize without overexplaining or spoiling its revelations. Suffice to say, Roy鈥檚 novel revolves around two tragic incidents that occur to two different children. Both of these moments are given to the reader up front, with the narrative itself only gradually circling back to them.
This technique works quite effectively. As Alfred Hitchcock used to explain, there is a fine distinction between surprise and suspense, and Roy understands it well. Though she tells you what鈥檚 coming down the road, she builds an enormous amount of tension is showing exactly how those distant points are reached. Roy executes so well that even her non-surprises are shocking.
***
The most important thing to know in approaching The God of Small Things is its structure, which can be a bit of a challenge. The story takes place in two different timelines. The first 鈥� and main 鈥� timeline is in 1969, where the important stuff happens. The second is in 1993, where the characters are still reeling, nearly a quarter century later.
Additionally, the 1969 story-thread is nonlinear, with both forwards and backwards temporal leaps. While Roy is not deliberately trying to confuse things 鈥� all these fractured pieces eventually fall into place in meaningful ways 鈥� you have to pay careful attention to the transitions. It took me a minute, but once I understood what to look for 鈥� once I knew where the plot was headed 鈥� everything made a lot more sense. I say this because The God of Small Things has a bit of a learning curve imbedded within it.
***
Our main characters are Rahel (a girl) and Esthappen (a boy), who are seven-year-old fraternal twins in 1969. They live in the village of Ayemenem in southwestern India, cared for by their single mother, Ammu, who has found herself cornered by life since she divorced her husband.
Ammu鈥檚 family owns a pickling factory, the control of which has been seized by Rahel and Esthappen鈥檚 Oxford-educated Uncle Chako. He was once married to an Englishwoman named Margaret, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie. The precipitating event in The God of Small Things is the visit of Margaret and Sophie to Ayemenem.
Roy鈥檚 handling of these people 鈥� and many more 鈥� is simply astounding. Everyone who walks across the stage gets their due. More than that, everyone is given dimension. There are some nasty folks in these pages, but all of that nastiness is earned. For example, Rahel and Esthappen have a hateful great-aunt known as Baby Kochamma. A thoroughgoing heel, she is also surprisingly sympathetic, given a fully-formed 鈥� and engrossing 鈥� backstory that explains how she came to be what she is, and how she came to do what she does. Even the archetypal police inspector, an officious jerk with just a passing role, is allowed a hint of shading as the cog of a machine.
To encompass this small universe, Roy employs an omniscient third-person perspective, in which she delves into the lives and innermost thoughts of just about everyone who appears on the page. By shifting perspectives at just the right time, though, she still manages to hold back several bombshells until late in the final act.
***
The prose is something else. It is lyrical and lush and evocative. Roy uses the lost art of the simile to marvelous effect, and has the ability to describe things with such tactility that to read this book is to feel like you鈥檝e seen a movie. From an airy church to a dingy airport, from a dusty road to a gaudy movie house, Roy creates incredibly detailed sets for her dramatic moments, making them an integral part of her scenes.
Roy pulls no punches in her writing, however, and this caused something of a backlash upon publication, and ever since. In particular, there is an unsparing depiction of a sexual assault in which she refuses to look away. The hideousness, the queasiness, are obviously the point 鈥� I did not sense any cheap, attention-seeking gratuity 鈥� and she lands the blows, but it鈥檚 also hard to read. Beyond that, there is a rawness and frankness to The God of Small Things that can be startling.
***
The God of Small Things is bursting with motifs, and Roy sets them out boldly. Some derive from the particulars of India, especially caste segregation dividing Touchables from Untouchables. Others, such as misogyny, betrayal, manipulation, and thwarted love, are universal.
In a lesser novel, this sort of thematic underlining could be pedantic, even trite. But the power of Roy鈥檚 writing, the vividness of her thorny, conflicted characters, and the intensity of the book鈥檚 climactic incidents give meaning to otherwise well-worn sentiments. Ammu, Rahel, and Esthappen are hopelessly stuck in the slipstream of history and society, unable to control the larger things, and left to cling to those brief handholds of joy. Death is the cost of life, and the riddle that animates The God of Small Things is figuring out how to make that steep price worth paying.
April 2, 2016
As I stand just outside the compound with the untended garden - an uninvited, random visitor - the darkened Ayemenem House resembles a haunted mansion, belying the truth of the lives it once nurtured with maternal protectiveness in its cozy interiors. Derelict. Abandoned. Forgotten.
But I remember. I remember the lives lived, and the loves which were birthed by circumstances, loves which breathed for a while before perishing on the altar of conformity.
I remember Chacko and Sophie Mol. Ammu and Velutha. Rahel and Estha.
And, most of all, I remember You. You, the painter of this portrait of a family's downward spiral into oblivion. You, the creator of this life-sized painting of a city and a nation, and all of human civilization in turn.
I see You as an iconoclast, persistent in your demand for liberties we are too submissive to dream of acquiring. You ask for things so heedlessly, so powerfully. The right to love whom we want and how much we want. The right to be equal. The right not to be discriminated against. The right not to be left languishing in solitude, battling painful memories. The right not to lose, at any cost, one's faith in the goodness in human beings.
You are the rebel we never considered becoming. We do not have courage like yours you see.
(Your opinions aired on national television are so often misinterpreted. Deliberately. Craftily.)
The sun inside of You that refuses to be subdued by the drear of political machinations, by the evil lurking in the human heart, by the sham of 'development' perpetrated under the helpful charade of nonexistent liberty, equality, fraternity, by every one saying 'No no no, you ask for too much. The world cannot ever be a fair place.', sent a little light my way.
That light gives me hope. Your Small God gives me hope.
He augurs that the overlooked small, mundane cruelties will only snowball into a tragedy of life-altering proportions later on, a gigantic boulder hurtling down the slope of a mountain crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable gory pulp of flesh and blood. Small God's wrath will eventually consume Big God's apathy and reduce it to mere cinders.
I hope your Small God is right.
You speak the esoteric language of children, whose inner worlds are but their own, beyond the reach of the sharpened claws of the Love Laws - worlds which are free and infinite, where fables, dreams and terrifying realities churn into a nonsensical lovely mass, worlds not tethered to earthly considerations. The two-egg twins' interlinked worlds, which stubbornly rejected the continued tyranny of the cycle of injustices perpetuated outside, were the same.
Their combined muteness throbbed with the dull ache of longing, loss and irreparable damage. Their collective passivity stood out as a blistering denouncement of humanity always coming second to zealously preserved blind prejudices. And You spoke through Rahel and Estha's silence which rung much louder than a giant church bell chiming away nearby.
We stew in our own insecurities and the irrelevance of small personal outrages, unable to take a step forward, helpless captives in the iron grip of the status quo of the world. While You, Ms Roy, take up your pen and fearlessly hail The God of Human Dignity, Empathy and Love - The God of Small Things.
So in this space, I thank that God for the Arundhati Roys of the world.
But I remember. I remember the lives lived, and the loves which were birthed by circumstances, loves which breathed for a while before perishing on the altar of conformity.
I remember Chacko and Sophie Mol. Ammu and Velutha. Rahel and Estha.
And, most of all, I remember You. You, the painter of this portrait of a family's downward spiral into oblivion. You, the creator of this life-sized painting of a city and a nation, and all of human civilization in turn.
I see You as an iconoclast, persistent in your demand for liberties we are too submissive to dream of acquiring. You ask for things so heedlessly, so powerfully. The right to love whom we want and how much we want. The right to be equal. The right not to be discriminated against. The right not to be left languishing in solitude, battling painful memories. The right not to lose, at any cost, one's faith in the goodness in human beings.
You are the rebel we never considered becoming. We do not have courage like yours you see.
(Your opinions aired on national television are so often misinterpreted. Deliberately. Craftily.)
The sun inside of You that refuses to be subdued by the drear of political machinations, by the evil lurking in the human heart, by the sham of 'development' perpetrated under the helpful charade of nonexistent liberty, equality, fraternity, by every one saying 'No no no, you ask for too much. The world cannot ever be a fair place.', sent a little light my way.
That light gives me hope. Your Small God gives me hope.
He augurs that the overlooked small, mundane cruelties will only snowball into a tragedy of life-altering proportions later on, a gigantic boulder hurtling down the slope of a mountain crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable gory pulp of flesh and blood. Small God's wrath will eventually consume Big God's apathy and reduce it to mere cinders.
I hope your Small God is right.
You speak the esoteric language of children, whose inner worlds are but their own, beyond the reach of the sharpened claws of the Love Laws - worlds which are free and infinite, where fables, dreams and terrifying realities churn into a nonsensical lovely mass, worlds not tethered to earthly considerations. The two-egg twins' interlinked worlds, which stubbornly rejected the continued tyranny of the cycle of injustices perpetuated outside, were the same.
Their combined muteness throbbed with the dull ache of longing, loss and irreparable damage. Their collective passivity stood out as a blistering denouncement of humanity always coming second to zealously preserved blind prejudices. And You spoke through Rahel and Estha's silence which rung much louder than a giant church bell chiming away nearby.
We stew in our own insecurities and the irrelevance of small personal outrages, unable to take a step forward, helpless captives in the iron grip of the status quo of the world. While You, Ms Roy, take up your pen and fearlessly hail The God of Human Dignity, Empathy and Love - The God of Small Things.
So in this space, I thank that God for the Arundhati Roys of the world.
December 2, 2021
(Book 92 from 1001 books) - The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things (1997) is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy.
It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much."
The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and their lives. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel (girl) and Esthappen (boy) are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.
Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi.
She persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man there but later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss.
She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi. ...
毓賳賵丕賳賴丕蹖 趩丕倬 卮丿賴 丿乇 丕蹖乇丕賳: 芦禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴禄貨 芦丕賱賴 亘蹖 讴爻丕賳禄貙 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貨 丕賳鬲卮丕乇丕鬲蹖賴丕 (毓賱賲貙 賲爻貙 胤賳蹖賳貙 乇賵夭诏丕乇貙 诏賵賴乇卮丕丿) 丕丿亘蹖丕鬲 賴賳丿貨 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳禺爻鬲蹖賳 禺賵丕賳卮: 乇賵夭 丿賵賲 賲丕賴 賲蹖 爻丕賱2012賲蹖賱丕丿蹖
毓賳賵丕賳: 禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴貨 丕孬乇: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貙 賲鬲乇噩賲: 诏蹖鬲丕 诏乇讴丕賳蹖貙 鬲毓丿丕丿 氐賮丨賴458貙 賳卮乇: 毓賱賲貙 鬲丕乇蹖禺: 乇賵夭25鬲蹖乇貙 爻丕賱1387貙 賲丨賱 賳卮乇 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 趩丕倬 賳丕賲卮禺氐貙 卮丕亘讴9644053672貨 賯胤毓 讴鬲丕亘: 乇賯毓蹖貙 賵夭賳: 丿乇950诏乇賲 賲賵囟賵毓 丿丕爻鬲丕賳賴丕蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿诏丕賳 賴賳丿 - 爻丿賴20賲
毓賳賵丕賳: 禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴貙 丕孬乇: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貙 賲鬲乇噩賲: 夭賴乇丕 亘乇賳丕讴貙 鬲毓丿丕丿 氐賮丨賴480氐貨 賳卮乇 賲爻貙 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳卮乇 丕乇丿蹖亘賴卮鬲 爻丕賱1379貨 賲丨賱 賳卮乇 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 趩丕倬 丕賵賱貙 卮丕亘讴9649202757貨 賯胤毓 讴鬲丕亘: 乇賯毓蹖貙 噩賱丿: 卮賵賲蹖夭
毓賳賵丕賳: 丕賱賴 亘蹖 讴爻丕賳貙 丕孬乇: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貙 賲鬲乇噩賲: 卮蹖乇蹖賳 乇丕蹖讴丕貙 鬲毓丿丕丿 氐賮丨賴350貙 賳卮乇 胤賳蹖賳貙 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳卮乇 爻丕賱1380貙 賲丨賱 賳卮乇 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 趩丕倬 丕賵賱
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毓賳賵丕賳: 禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴貙 丕孬乇: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貙 賲鬲乇噩賲: 卮蹖乇蹖賳 卮乇蹖賮蹖丕賳貨 鬲毓丿丕丿 氐賮丨賴320貙 賳卮乇 诏鈥嵸堎団€嵷必粹€嵷ж� 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳卮乇 爻丕賱1380貙 賲丨賱 賳卮乇 鬲賴乇丕賳貨 卮丕亘讴9646905358貨
讴鬲丕亘 芦禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴禄 亘乇賳丿賴 颅蹖 噩丕蹖夭賴 芦亘賵讴乇禄 丿乇 爻丕賱1997賲蹖賱丕丿蹖貙 丕孬乇 芦丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖禄貙 丿乇 丕蹖乇丕賳 賲丕 亘丕 倬賳噩 鬲乇噩賲賴鈥� 蹖 丕夭 爻賵蹖 亘丕賳賵丕賳 賮乇賴蹖禺鬲賴: 芦诏蹖鬲丕 诏乇讴丕賳蹖禄貙 芦夭賴乇丕 亘乇賳丕讴禄貙 芦卮蹖乇蹖賳 乇丕蹖讴丕禄貙 芦诏賱乇蹖夭 賯丿爻蹖禄貙 賵 芦卮蹖乇蹖賳 卮乇蹖賮蹖丕賳禄貙 鬲賵爻胤 賳丕卮乇賴丕 賲賳鬲卮乇 卮丿賴 丕爻鬲
禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴貙 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 禺賵丕賴乇 賵 亘乇丕丿乇 丿賵賯賱賵蹖 芦賴賳丿蹖禄貙 亘丕 賳丕賲鈥屬囏й� 芦丕賽爻鬲丕禄 賵 芦乇丕丨賱禄 丕爻鬲貙 讴賴 賲乇诏 丿禺鬲乇 禺丕賱賴 蹖 賳賴 爻丕賱賴貙 賵 蹖讴 毓卮賯 賲賲賳賵毓貙 丿賳蹖丕蹖 讴賵丿讴蹖鈥� 丌賳丕賳 乇丕 賳丕亘賵丿 賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀� 丕夭 爻賵蹖 丿蹖诏乇貙 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 丕蹖賳 讴鬲丕亘 爻蹖乇蹖 丿乇 爻乇诏匕卮鬲 丕賳丿賵賴賳丕讴 禺丕賳賵丕丿賴鈥� 丕蹖 丕爻鬲貙 讴賴 賴賳噩丕乇卮讴賳蹖 讴乇丿賴貙 賵 丿乇 亘乇丕亘乇 賯賵丕賳蹖賳 爻賳鬲蹖 賲蹖鈥屫й屫池嗀� 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 乇賲丕賳貙 亘蹖丕賳诏乇 丕賵囟丕毓 爻蹖丕爻蹖 芦賴賳丿賵爻鬲丕賳禄貙 丿乇 丿賴賴 蹖1960賲蹖賱丕丿蹖 丕爻鬲貙 亘丕夭賳賲丕蹖蹖 丿賵诏丕賳诏蹖 賲蹖丕賳 丿賵 胤亘賯賴颅 蹖 賮乇賵丿爻鬲 噩丕賲毓賴 蹖毓賳蹖 芦賳噩爻鈥屬囏� 丕夭 蹖讴爻賵貙 賵 孬乇賵鬲賲賳丿丕賳 丌賳 噩丕賲毓賴 丕夭 爻賵蹖 丿蹖诏乇 丕爻鬲貙 賴賲趩賳蹖賳 亘丕夭诏賵蹖蹖 爻賳賳貙 賵 丌丿丕亘 賲乇丿賲丕賳 芦賴賳丿禄貙 亘丕 鬲讴蹖賴 亘乇 丕爻丕胤蹖乇 丌賳 爻乇夭賲蹖賳 賳蹖夭 賴爻鬲貨 芦乇丕丨賱禄貙 賵 芦丕爻鬲丕禄貙 亘乇丕丿乇 賵 禺賵丕賴乇蹖 丿賵賯賱賵 賴爻鬲賳丿貙 讴賴 丿乇 讴賵丿讴蹖 丕夭 蹖讴丿蹖诏乇 噩丿丕 诏卮鬲賴貙 賵 倬爻 丕夭 爻丕賱颅賴丕貙 丕讴賳賵賳 丿乇 讴賳丕乇 蹖讴丿蹖诏乇賳丿貨 芦賮賱卮 亘讴禄 亘賴 乇賵蹖丿丕丿賴丕蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 丕蹖賳 丿賵貙 胤賱丕賯 賲丕丿乇 芦丌賲賵禄貙 丿禺鬲乇 丿丕蹖蹖 賳蹖賲賴 丕賳诏賱蹖爻蹖貙 賵....貨 賴賲丕賳 讴賱蹖卮賴 颅蹖 賮蹖賱賲颅賴丕蹖 芦賴賳丿蹖禄 丕爻鬲貙 讴賴 丿禺鬲乇蹖 孬乇賵鬲賲賳丿貙 毓丕卮賯 賲乇丿蹖 賳丕丿丕乇 賲蹖卮賵丿貙 禺賵丕賴乇 賵 亘乇丕丿乇蹖 讴賴 倬爻 丕夭 爻丕賱颅賴丕 亘賴 賴賲 賲蹖颅乇爻賳丿貨 芦乇賵蹖禄貙 亘丕 賳賵卮鬲賳 丕蹖賳 讴鬲丕亘貙 噩丕蹖夭賴 蹖 芦亘賵讴乇禄 乇丕 亘乇丿賳丿貙 賵 爻倬爻 丿乇 丕毓鬲乇丕囟 亘賴 丨賲賱賴 颅蹖 芦丌賲乇蹖讴丕禄 亘賴 芦丕賮睾丕賳爻鬲丕賳禄貙 賴賲丕賳 噩丕蹖夭賴 乇丕 倬爻 丿丕丿賳丿
賳賯賱 丕夭 讴鬲丕亘: (丕诏乇 丕賵 乇丕 賱賲爻 賲蹖颅讴乇丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 亘丕 丕賵 丨乇賮 亘夭賳丿貙 丕诏乇 毓丕卮賯 丕賵 賲蹖颅卮丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 亘乇賵丿貨 丕诏乇 丨乇賮 賲蹖颅夭丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 亘卮賳賵丿貨 丕诏乇 賲蹖噩賳诏蹖丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 倬蹖乇賵夭 卮賵丿.)貨 倬丕蹖丕賳 賳賯賱
鬲丕乇蹖禺 亘賴賳诏丕賲 乇爻丕賳蹖 03/10/1399賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 10/09/1400賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 丕. 卮乇亘蹖丕賳蹖
The God of Small Things (1997) is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy.
It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much."
The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and their lives. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel (girl) and Esthappen (boy) are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.
Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi.
She persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man there but later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss.
She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi. ...
毓賳賵丕賳賴丕蹖 趩丕倬 卮丿賴 丿乇 丕蹖乇丕賳: 芦禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴禄貨 芦丕賱賴 亘蹖 讴爻丕賳禄貙 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貨 丕賳鬲卮丕乇丕鬲蹖賴丕 (毓賱賲貙 賲爻貙 胤賳蹖賳貙 乇賵夭诏丕乇貙 诏賵賴乇卮丕丿) 丕丿亘蹖丕鬲 賴賳丿貨 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳禺爻鬲蹖賳 禺賵丕賳卮: 乇賵夭 丿賵賲 賲丕賴 賲蹖 爻丕賱2012賲蹖賱丕丿蹖
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毓賳賵丕賳: 禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴貙 丕孬乇: 丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖貙 賲鬲乇噩賲: 卮蹖乇蹖賳 卮乇蹖賮蹖丕賳貨 鬲毓丿丕丿 氐賮丨賴320貙 賳卮乇 诏鈥嵸堎団€嵷必粹€嵷ж� 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳卮乇 爻丕賱1380貙 賲丨賱 賳卮乇 鬲賴乇丕賳貨 卮丕亘讴9646905358貨
讴鬲丕亘 芦禺丿丕蹖 趩蹖夭賴丕蹖 讴賵趩讴禄 亘乇賳丿賴 颅蹖 噩丕蹖夭賴 芦亘賵讴乇禄 丿乇 爻丕賱1997賲蹖賱丕丿蹖貙 丕孬乇 芦丌乇賵賳丿丕鬲蹖 乇賵蹖禄貙 丿乇 丕蹖乇丕賳 賲丕 亘丕 倬賳噩 鬲乇噩賲賴鈥� 蹖 丕夭 爻賵蹖 亘丕賳賵丕賳 賮乇賴蹖禺鬲賴: 芦诏蹖鬲丕 诏乇讴丕賳蹖禄貙 芦夭賴乇丕 亘乇賳丕讴禄貙 芦卮蹖乇蹖賳 乇丕蹖讴丕禄貙 芦诏賱乇蹖夭 賯丿爻蹖禄貙 賵 芦卮蹖乇蹖賳 卮乇蹖賮蹖丕賳禄貙 鬲賵爻胤 賳丕卮乇賴丕 賲賳鬲卮乇 卮丿賴 丕爻鬲
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賳賯賱 丕夭 讴鬲丕亘: (丕诏乇 丕賵 乇丕 賱賲爻 賲蹖颅讴乇丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 亘丕 丕賵 丨乇賮 亘夭賳丿貙 丕诏乇 毓丕卮賯 丕賵 賲蹖颅卮丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 亘乇賵丿貨 丕诏乇 丨乇賮 賲蹖颅夭丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 亘卮賳賵丿貨 丕诏乇 賲蹖噩賳诏蹖丿貙 賳賲蹖颅鬲賵丕賳爻鬲 倬蹖乇賵夭 卮賵丿.)貨 倬丕蹖丕賳 賳賯賱
鬲丕乇蹖禺 亘賴賳诏丕賲 乇爻丕賳蹖 03/10/1399賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 10/09/1400賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 丕. 卮乇亘蹖丕賳蹖
April 5, 2022
I was grabbed viscerally by this book since yesterday that I finished today which I ended with the word 鈥淭omorrow.鈥� It was beautifully written, but it took me a while to appreciate the supersaturated text as there are analogies and allusions in nearly every sentence. The characters are drawn graphically and realistically. I also liked the Capital Letter words and concepts that are sort of a kids filter on the omniscient narrator鈥檚 text. My issue with the book is that all of the characters lack a soul (the ones alive at the end in any case.) In a sense, it is somewhat predictable, but purposefully so because the foreboding of the climax comes from the opening pages. The final breaking of Love鈥檚 Law was, in my view, unnecessary and a bit gratuitous. I am not undermining its strong and necessary feminist undercurrent or, again, the marvelous verbal tapestry that Roy has woven, but i felt a bit at the end like, what was the point? It felt like she settled for a Bollywood-style dramatic finish rather than a more Flauberian one (which given her command of language was at least possible.)
This is a modern classic and an important read, I just feel I have read others that left me with a less empty feeling at the end.
This is a modern classic and an important read, I just feel I have read others that left me with a less empty feeling at the end.
January 28, 2016
"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."
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."
May 11, 2015
A lyrical, mysterious tale of misunderstanding and pain, echoing through the years. At its dark heart, it demonstrates how small things can have multiple and major consequences, meaning that everything can change in a single day. "Anything can happen to anyone. It's best to be prepared." - and these fears trigger tragedy.
It is set in Kerala (southern India) in 1969 (when twins Rahel (girl) and Estha (boy) are aged 7) and 23 years later, when the twins return to the family home. As the narrative switches periods, hints become clearer and eventually become facts: you know bad things will happen, but it's not initially clear who will be the perpetrators. There is beauty, but always brooding menace of nastiness to come, or echoes of trauma long ago.
Caste, communism, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", "The Sound of Music", whom to love (and how), and insects (especially moths) are common threads.
THE FAMILY
They are affluent, educated, Anglophile, Syrian Christians. The grandfather (Pappachi) was the Imperial Entomologist and in later years his wife (Mammachi) and their son (Chacko) started a pickle factory (a pickle factory is also significant in Rushdie's Midnight's Children). Their daughter, Ammu, is the divorced mother of the twins, and has "the infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber". The twins' great aunt (Baby Kochamma) lives there as well. She is a bitter woman, who loved, but never had, Father Mulligan, so retreats into false piety. She seeks and relishes opportunities to gloat at the misdemeanours and misfortunes of others: on hearing of scandal, "She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of sin".
The big event is when Chacko's English ex wife (Margaret) is widowed and she brings Chacko's 9 year old daughter (Sophie Mol) to visit.
The other key character is Velutha (son of Vellya Paapen), a clever untouchable, a couple of years younger than Ammu. The family pay for his education and he becomes indispensable at the factory for maintaining the machines, though carpentry is his true skill. There is also Kochu Maria, a house servant, who becomes more like Baby Kochamma's companion in later years.
TWINSHIP
The powerful bond of "two-egg" twins is essential to the story: "In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun... Estha and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us... a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities."
However, they spend the years between the two time periods living apart, and that, inevitably, changes things. When returning as an adult, "now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them... Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Links have appeared." They are now "A pair of actors... stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else's sorrow", and realising, too late, "You're not the Sinners. You're the Sinned Against."
GHOSTS
The family is founded on preservation: first of insects, then of Paradise Pickles and Preserves, and always of reputation. However, ghosts are everywhere, mainly in the memories of the dead and the ramifications of their deaths, but also in other forms of loss: opportunities, love, names (the twins are without a surname when their parents split) and even the power of speech. "Silence hung in the air like a secret loss."
Sophie Mol's death is mentioned on page 4, and although its significance is constantly referred to, the details are only revealed very near the end. Her death "stepped softly around the house... like a quiet thing in socks" and "sometimes the memory of death lives... much longer than the life it purloined". Eventually "Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season."
Those left behind experience "Not death. Just the end of living."
The family home descends into dilapidation. Baby Kochamma, once an skilled gardener, lets her plants wither or go wild, while she devotes her life to vicariously living the lives of ghosts she sees on satellite TV.
There is also an abandoned house across the river that the twins nickname The History House. There are many explicit comparisons with The Heart of Darkness: it was the home of Kari Saipu, and Englishman who "went native" and "captured dreams and redreamed them". Eventually, he shot himself when his young lover was taken away.
BETRAYAL AND THE DEATH OF LOVE
There are violent relationships, broken relationships (not necessarily the same) and unrequited love, but it is, of course, the children who suffer most.
The twins are raised by their loving but strict mother, but they are haunted by a fear that she will cease to love them. Their "willingness to love people who didn't really love them... was as though the window through which their father disappeared had been kept open for anyone." After Sophie Mol's death, when everything changes,
There are other forms and instances of betrayal and lies, sometimes to keep up appearances, and sometimes for selfish ends.
CROSSING BOUNDARIES - OF LOVE AND OTHER THINGS
Taboos are many in a society ruled by caste (as well as class and religion), but the family's problems with classification are first highlighted in relation to jams and jellies, and the fact that banana jam was illegal as if fitted neither category. "They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much." And by whom.
Gradually, "Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws." "History used the back verandah to negotiate its terms and collect its dues. Estha would keep the receipt for the dues that Velutha paid." When pressed by an adult to lie about something significant, "Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt. Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared."
There is also confusion and hypocrisy around some of the power relationships, e.g. a wealthy communist landlord and factory owner with "a Marxist mind and feudal libido", and of course, the different levels of sexual freedom permitted for men and women.
SMALL THINGS: MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES
The whole story is really a demonstration of The Butterfly Effect, although it's moths that are mentioned explicitly (Pappachi discovered a new variety of moth, but wasn't recognised for it).
"It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while in clear view."
There are many other Small Things:
* "The God of Loss. The God of Small Things."
* Ammu telling Rahel "When you hurt people they begin to love you less", a throwaway line that grows, festers and twists within until it changes the lives of everyone.
* Ammu is "Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big".
* At big moments "only the Small Things are ever said".
* A couple who know they have no future, so "instinctively they stick to the Small Things"
* Filth and decay, of which there is much 23 years later, is an accumulation of small things.
PORTMANTEAUS
A distinctive feature of the writing is the large number of portmanteau coinages. Most are pairs of adjectives or adjective plus noun: sourmetal, oldfood, fishswimming, chinskin, deadlypurposed, longago, suddenshutter, sharksmile, orangedrinks, steelshrill, suddenshutter, stickysweet. However, things like cuff-links are written with a hyphen. Cuff-links also hint at an explanation: when the young twins are told they are "'to link cuffs together'... they were thrilled by this morsel of logic... and gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language."
QUOTES
* "Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, flatly baffled in the sun."
* "The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation" and in monsoon season "short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with."
* "Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background... [he] occupied very little space in the world."
* "Once the quietness arrived, it... enfolded him in its swampy arms... It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles... 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."
* "Gulf-money houses build by [people] who worked hard but unhappily in faraway places... the resentful older houses tinged green with envy, cowering in their private driveways."
* "drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge."
* "Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses."
* He walked away "like a high-stepping camel with an appointment to keep."
* "Rahel tried to say something. It came out jagged. Like a piece of tin."
* "twinkled was a word with crinkled, happy edges."
* The weight of obligation "widened his smile and bent his back".
* The things that can't be forgotten "sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds, with baleful sideways starting eyes".
* "Silverfish tunnelled through the pages, burrowing arbitrarily from species to species, turning organised information into yellow lace."
* "The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast."
* An adult playing with children "Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction".
* "Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant."
* "resting under the skin of her dreams"
* The "transparent" kiss of a child "unclouded by passion or desire... that demanded no kiss-back. Not a cloudy kiss full of questions."
* "The great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably."
* "She was too young to realise that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself."
THANKS
I should add that I am really grateful to Steve whose excellent review, and comments beneath, persuaded me to pick up this book asap, rather than let it languish on my shelves any longer. His review is here: /review/show...
It is set in Kerala (southern India) in 1969 (when twins Rahel (girl) and Estha (boy) are aged 7) and 23 years later, when the twins return to the family home. As the narrative switches periods, hints become clearer and eventually become facts: you know bad things will happen, but it's not initially clear who will be the perpetrators. There is beauty, but always brooding menace of nastiness to come, or echoes of trauma long ago.
Caste, communism, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", "The Sound of Music", whom to love (and how), and insects (especially moths) are common threads.
THE FAMILY
They are affluent, educated, Anglophile, Syrian Christians. The grandfather (Pappachi) was the Imperial Entomologist and in later years his wife (Mammachi) and their son (Chacko) started a pickle factory (a pickle factory is also significant in Rushdie's Midnight's Children). Their daughter, Ammu, is the divorced mother of the twins, and has "the infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber". The twins' great aunt (Baby Kochamma) lives there as well. She is a bitter woman, who loved, but never had, Father Mulligan, so retreats into false piety. She seeks and relishes opportunities to gloat at the misdemeanours and misfortunes of others: on hearing of scandal, "She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of sin".
The big event is when Chacko's English ex wife (Margaret) is widowed and she brings Chacko's 9 year old daughter (Sophie Mol) to visit.
The other key character is Velutha (son of Vellya Paapen), a clever untouchable, a couple of years younger than Ammu. The family pay for his education and he becomes indispensable at the factory for maintaining the machines, though carpentry is his true skill. There is also Kochu Maria, a house servant, who becomes more like Baby Kochamma's companion in later years.
TWINSHIP
The powerful bond of "two-egg" twins is essential to the story: "In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun... Estha and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us... a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities."
However, they spend the years between the two time periods living apart, and that, inevitably, changes things. When returning as an adult, "now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them... Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Links have appeared." They are now "A pair of actors... stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else's sorrow", and realising, too late, "You're not the Sinners. You're the Sinned Against."
GHOSTS
The family is founded on preservation: first of insects, then of Paradise Pickles and Preserves, and always of reputation. However, ghosts are everywhere, mainly in the memories of the dead and the ramifications of their deaths, but also in other forms of loss: opportunities, love, names (the twins are without a surname when their parents split) and even the power of speech. "Silence hung in the air like a secret loss."
Sophie Mol's death is mentioned on page 4, and although its significance is constantly referred to, the details are only revealed very near the end. Her death "stepped softly around the house... like a quiet thing in socks" and "sometimes the memory of death lives... much longer than the life it purloined". Eventually "Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season."
Those left behind experience "Not death. Just the end of living."
The family home descends into dilapidation. Baby Kochamma, once an skilled gardener, lets her plants wither or go wild, while she devotes her life to vicariously living the lives of ghosts she sees on satellite TV.
There is also an abandoned house across the river that the twins nickname The History House. There are many explicit comparisons with The Heart of Darkness: it was the home of Kari Saipu, and Englishman who "went native" and "captured dreams and redreamed them". Eventually, he shot himself when his young lover was taken away.
BETRAYAL AND THE DEATH OF LOVE
There are violent relationships, broken relationships (not necessarily the same) and unrequited love, but it is, of course, the children who suffer most.
The twins are raised by their loving but strict mother, but they are haunted by a fear that she will cease to love them. Their "willingness to love people who didn't really love them... was as though the window through which their father disappeared had been kept open for anyone." After Sophie Mol's death, when everything changes,
There are other forms and instances of betrayal and lies, sometimes to keep up appearances, and sometimes for selfish ends.
CROSSING BOUNDARIES - OF LOVE AND OTHER THINGS
Taboos are many in a society ruled by caste (as well as class and religion), but the family's problems with classification are first highlighted in relation to jams and jellies, and the fact that banana jam was illegal as if fitted neither category. "They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much." And by whom.
Gradually, "Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws." "History used the back verandah to negotiate its terms and collect its dues. Estha would keep the receipt for the dues that Velutha paid." When pressed by an adult to lie about something significant, "Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt. Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared."
There is also confusion and hypocrisy around some of the power relationships, e.g. a wealthy communist landlord and factory owner with "a Marxist mind and feudal libido", and of course, the different levels of sexual freedom permitted for men and women.
SMALL THINGS: MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES
The whole story is really a demonstration of The Butterfly Effect, although it's moths that are mentioned explicitly (Pappachi discovered a new variety of moth, but wasn't recognised for it).
"It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while in clear view."
There are many other Small Things:
* "The God of Loss. The God of Small Things."
* Ammu telling Rahel "When you hurt people they begin to love you less", a throwaway line that grows, festers and twists within until it changes the lives of everyone.
* Ammu is "Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big".
* At big moments "only the Small Things are ever said".
* A couple who know they have no future, so "instinctively they stick to the Small Things"
* Filth and decay, of which there is much 23 years later, is an accumulation of small things.
PORTMANTEAUS
A distinctive feature of the writing is the large number of portmanteau coinages. Most are pairs of adjectives or adjective plus noun: sourmetal, oldfood, fishswimming, chinskin, deadlypurposed, longago, suddenshutter, sharksmile, orangedrinks, steelshrill, suddenshutter, stickysweet. However, things like cuff-links are written with a hyphen. Cuff-links also hint at an explanation: when the young twins are told they are "'to link cuffs together'... they were thrilled by this morsel of logic... and gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language."
QUOTES
* "Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, flatly baffled in the sun."
* "The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation" and in monsoon season "short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with."
* "Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background... [he] occupied very little space in the world."
* "Once the quietness arrived, it... enfolded him in its swampy arms... It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles... 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."
* "Gulf-money houses build by [people] who worked hard but unhappily in faraway places... the resentful older houses tinged green with envy, cowering in their private driveways."
* "drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge."
* "Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses."
* He walked away "like a high-stepping camel with an appointment to keep."
* "Rahel tried to say something. It came out jagged. Like a piece of tin."
* "twinkled was a word with crinkled, happy edges."
* The weight of obligation "widened his smile and bent his back".
* The things that can't be forgotten "sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds, with baleful sideways starting eyes".
* "Silverfish tunnelled through the pages, burrowing arbitrarily from species to species, turning organised information into yellow lace."
* "The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast."
* An adult playing with children "Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction".
* "Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant."
* "resting under the skin of her dreams"
* The "transparent" kiss of a child "unclouded by passion or desire... that demanded no kiss-back. Not a cloudy kiss full of questions."
* "The great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably."
* "She was too young to realise that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself."
THANKS
I should add that I am really grateful to Steve whose excellent review, and comments beneath, persuaded me to pick up this book asap, rather than let it languish on my shelves any longer. His review is here: /review/show...
November 3, 2016
I remember trying to read this book half a dozen times. Everyone else liked it, so I thought I must get through it, but I never could. I loathed the characters and didn't want to read about them so although I would regularly make it to about 100 pages, more than that I couldn't do. Maybe I should have perservered, but life is too short and there are too many 5 star books to discover out there. What is the expression, ars longa, vita brevia?
Read
June 9, 2007As 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.
August 4, 2021
If one ever has trouble sleeping at night, then I highly recommend "The God of small things". It has been tried and tested by yours truly, and quite honestly, this is one of the most underwhelming books that I've read in a good while.
This won the Booker prize in 1997, and reading some of the positive reviews on here, I was expecting to be truly dazzled. I hear that this book is important. Important to whom exactly? I felt nothing for this.
I think I can address the main issue immediately, that being, I just couldn't follow what was written. The plot was everywhere. It didn't feel smoothly written, the plot was detached which mostly lead to a great deal of confusion and irritation on my end. There were lots of flashbacks, which made the present tense storyline disorientated.
Now, I love beautiful writing, but this became incredibly tedious. There were SO many metaphors thrown in, and it was difficult to recognise if I was reading something significant to the plot or not. It just didn't work, and, there is a such word called "overuse".
I cannot go into considerable detail about the characters, as the character development was basically non existent. There were a good amount of characters in this book, and by the end of the book, they were still just names to me.
This book for me, was comparable to one of those mud pies, that you make as a kid, in which you add a bit of everything to, grass, stones, your dads gardening gloves, your ghostbuster figures, and eventually, what you get, is one huge, confused mess.
TIP: Never trust a Booker prize winner.
This won the Booker prize in 1997, and reading some of the positive reviews on here, I was expecting to be truly dazzled. I hear that this book is important. Important to whom exactly? I felt nothing for this.
I think I can address the main issue immediately, that being, I just couldn't follow what was written. The plot was everywhere. It didn't feel smoothly written, the plot was detached which mostly lead to a great deal of confusion and irritation on my end. There were lots of flashbacks, which made the present tense storyline disorientated.
Now, I love beautiful writing, but this became incredibly tedious. There were SO many metaphors thrown in, and it was difficult to recognise if I was reading something significant to the plot or not. It just didn't work, and, there is a such word called "overuse".
I cannot go into considerable detail about the characters, as the character development was basically non existent. There were a good amount of characters in this book, and by the end of the book, they were still just names to me.
This book for me, was comparable to one of those mud pies, that you make as a kid, in which you add a bit of everything to, grass, stones, your dads gardening gloves, your ghostbuster figures, and eventually, what you get, is one huge, confused mess.
TIP: Never trust a Booker prize winner.
February 8, 2021
The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it鈥檚 quite something. To be more specific, it鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥� 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974)
Marilyn Robinson 鈥� 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)
And the champ
Henry Roth 鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 like some of 鈥榚m 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鈥檛 turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can鈥檛 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鈥檚 eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won鈥檛 be everybody鈥檚 bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there鈥檚 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鈥檛 let that put you off.
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鈥檚 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 鈥� 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974)
Marilyn Robinson 鈥� 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)
And the champ
Henry Roth 鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 like some of 鈥榚m 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鈥檛 turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can鈥檛 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鈥檚 eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won鈥檛 be everybody鈥檚 bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there鈥檚 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鈥檛 let that put you off.
October 22, 2017
I tried to stay afloat with all my willpower but the unchained maelstrom gurgling in Small Miracles and Big Calamities sprouting from this novel proved to be far too violent for my feeble arms and my fragile heart. So I drowned. I died a thousand deaths engulfed by the swelling waters of this lush river of flowing allegories and rippling parables that washed my being over and over again in waves of piercing beauty and unbearable sadness.
Mimicking the natural cycle of the lunar tide, Arundhati Roy fills the meaningless river of existence with steady repetitions of insignificant details in Small Lives to disclose unutterable Big Losses that leave no footprints in a Godless shore where only raw lyricism exists, a lyricism that kicks the reader in the gut with its brutal magic realism.
Small Things. Small Lives. Unimportant People.
Regal Mammachi founded the family business Paradise Pickles & Preserves and Pappachi beat her daily with the expected traditional cruelty because they wouldn鈥檛 name His Moth after him. Grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, to whom happiness eluded a long time ago, poisons the minds of the abandoned souls around her like a slithering snake that bites back in stealthy bitterness. Chacko, the son and heir of the family, is the apple of Mammachi鈥檚 eye, a conflicted Anglophile and a self-proclaimed Marxist whose identity has been snatched away by the conquerors he so much admires. His sister Ammu is a divorced mother of two-egg twins, whose golden skin transpires a stirring restlessness when she sits on the riverbed with stars in her eyes, bathed in silver moonbeams and aching to be cherished. Velutha, the Untouchable carpenter of a lower caste, carries the river inside him and dives gracefully to wistful shores of vulnerable dreams made of pieces of porcelain where fair and dark can melt in streams of unforbidden passion ignoring the Love Laws that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much".
A Small Family in a Big boat-shaped piece of Earth seen through the innocent eyes of two-egg twins, Estha and Rahel, also known as Ambassador Elvis Pelvis for Estha鈥檚 pointy shoes and Ambassador Stick Insect for Pappachi鈥檚 trapped Moth that flutters inside Rahel鈥檚 heart. When their clean, blonde and adorable British cousin Sophie, Chacko and his ex-wife Margaret鈥檚 daughter, enters the twins鈥� lives they sense rather than understand their Smallness in this Big Play of life, where not all children are equal to those who most matter.
The glorious river, fecund with fish of bigotry, keeps streaming down to a blind date with History, where two-egg twins sail in the boat of blameless childhood unaware of mankind鈥檚 Heart of Darkness and Orangedrinks, Lemonadedrinks evils that prowl these murky waters. Waves of grief and guilt will inundate the twins鈥� vessel for the rest of their journey and only when they finally cross the river twenty-three years later, only when they allow their "Not old. Not Young. But a viable die-able age" two eggs to fuse into one will they find fading relief and slippery consolation.
This is the story of Small people who inhabit a vast world where no 鈥淕od of Big Things" can exist as long as the Laws of abuse and atrocity prevail over the Laws of love and compassion, as long as a "man鈥檚 death can be more profitable than his life has ever been."
Arundhati Roy unleashes her constrained rage above and below the surface of her cascading voice soaking her text with random capitalization, purposeful italics and titleless chapters which contain Terrors better left unsaid disguised in sumptuous metaphors and lethal prose-poetry, dragging the reader softly with the undercurrents of her pearly writing. I tried to swim, but I drowned. I drowned in beauty and sadness. I dissolved into Roy鈥檚 waters. All that was left was a dripping heart-shaped hole in my fluid universe and a faltering hope that things can change in a day and that there is still Tomorrow. Maybe. Or Maybe not.
Mimicking the natural cycle of the lunar tide, Arundhati Roy fills the meaningless river of existence with steady repetitions of insignificant details in Small Lives to disclose unutterable Big Losses that leave no footprints in a Godless shore where only raw lyricism exists, a lyricism that kicks the reader in the gut with its brutal magic realism.
Small Things. Small Lives. Unimportant People.
Regal Mammachi founded the family business Paradise Pickles & Preserves and Pappachi beat her daily with the expected traditional cruelty because they wouldn鈥檛 name His Moth after him. Grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, to whom happiness eluded a long time ago, poisons the minds of the abandoned souls around her like a slithering snake that bites back in stealthy bitterness. Chacko, the son and heir of the family, is the apple of Mammachi鈥檚 eye, a conflicted Anglophile and a self-proclaimed Marxist whose identity has been snatched away by the conquerors he so much admires. His sister Ammu is a divorced mother of two-egg twins, whose golden skin transpires a stirring restlessness when she sits on the riverbed with stars in her eyes, bathed in silver moonbeams and aching to be cherished. Velutha, the Untouchable carpenter of a lower caste, carries the river inside him and dives gracefully to wistful shores of vulnerable dreams made of pieces of porcelain where fair and dark can melt in streams of unforbidden passion ignoring the Love Laws that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much".
A Small Family in a Big boat-shaped piece of Earth seen through the innocent eyes of two-egg twins, Estha and Rahel, also known as Ambassador Elvis Pelvis for Estha鈥檚 pointy shoes and Ambassador Stick Insect for Pappachi鈥檚 trapped Moth that flutters inside Rahel鈥檚 heart. When their clean, blonde and adorable British cousin Sophie, Chacko and his ex-wife Margaret鈥檚 daughter, enters the twins鈥� lives they sense rather than understand their Smallness in this Big Play of life, where not all children are equal to those who most matter.
The glorious river, fecund with fish of bigotry, keeps streaming down to a blind date with History, where two-egg twins sail in the boat of blameless childhood unaware of mankind鈥檚 Heart of Darkness and Orangedrinks, Lemonadedrinks evils that prowl these murky waters. Waves of grief and guilt will inundate the twins鈥� vessel for the rest of their journey and only when they finally cross the river twenty-three years later, only when they allow their "Not old. Not Young. But a viable die-able age" two eggs to fuse into one will they find fading relief and slippery consolation.
This is the story of Small people who inhabit a vast world where no 鈥淕od of Big Things" can exist as long as the Laws of abuse and atrocity prevail over the Laws of love and compassion, as long as a "man鈥檚 death can be more profitable than his life has ever been."
Arundhati Roy unleashes her constrained rage above and below the surface of her cascading voice soaking her text with random capitalization, purposeful italics and titleless chapters which contain Terrors better left unsaid disguised in sumptuous metaphors and lethal prose-poetry, dragging the reader softly with the undercurrents of her pearly writing. I tried to swim, but I drowned. I drowned in beauty and sadness. I dissolved into Roy鈥檚 waters. All that was left was a dripping heart-shaped hole in my fluid universe and a faltering hope that things can change in a day and that there is still Tomorrow. Maybe. Or Maybe not.
February 8, 2017
芦螣 胃蔚蠈蟼 蟿蠅谓 渭喂魏蟻蠋谓 蟺蟻伪纬渭维蟿蠅谓 蔚委谓伪喂 畏 伪谓维蟺慰未畏 蟺位蔚蠀蟻维 伪蠀蟿慰蠉 蟺慰蠀 谓慰渭委味慰蠀渭蔚 蠈蟿喂 蔚委谓伪喂 慰 螛蔚蠈蟼. 螣喂 维谓胃蟻蠅蟺慰喂 蟺喂蟽蟿蔚蠉慰蠀谓 蠈蟿喂 慰 螛蔚蠈蟼 蔚委谓伪喂 魏维蟿喂 蟺慰位蠉 渭蔚纬维位慰, 苇蠂慰蠀谓 蟽蟿慰 渭蠀伪位蠈 蟿慰蠀蟼 苇谓伪谓 螛蔚蠈 蔚尉慰蠀蟽喂伪蟽蟿萎, 蔚谓蠋 慰 胃蔚蠈蟼 蟿蠅谓 渭喂魏蟻蠋谓 蟺蟻伪纬渭维蟿蠅谓 未蔚谓 苇蠂蔚喂 蔚尉慰蠀蟽委伪. 螘委谓伪喂 畏 蠁蠉蟽畏, 畏 纬畏, 蟿伪 魏伪胃畏渭蔚蟻喂谓维 蟺蟻维纬渭伪蟿伪, 蠈位伪 伪蠀蟿维 蟺慰蠀 蔚谓蠋谓慰谓蟿伪喂 魏伪喂 蟽蠀谓伪谓蟿慰蠉谓 蟿畏谓 螜蟽蟿慰蟻委伪禄.
螘委渭伪蟽蟿蔚 蟽蟿慰 蠂蠅蟻喂蠈 螒纬喂伪渭伪谓维渭 蟿畏蟼 螝蔚蟻维位伪蟼 蟽蟿畏谓 螜谓未委伪.
危蔚 渭喂伪 螜谓未委伪 蔚尉伪胃位喂蠅渭苇谓畏,渭委味蔚蟻畏,蠁蟿蠅蠂萎 魏伪喂 尾蟻蠈渭喂魏畏 蟺慰蠀 尾蟻维味蔚喂 纬喂伪 魏慰喂谓蠅谓喂魏苇蟼 魏伪喂 蟺慰位喂蟿喂魏苇蟼 伪位位伪纬苇蟼. 螕喂伪 魏伪位蠉蟿蔚蟻慰 蟿蟻蠈蟺慰 味蠅萎蟼,纬喂伪 伪谓胃蟻蠋蟺喂谓伪 未喂魏伪喂蠋渭伪蟿伪,纬喂伪 蔚喂蟻萎谓畏,未畏渭慰魏蟻伪蟿委伪,喂蟽蠈蟿畏蟿伪.
螠喂伪 蟽蠀纬魏位慰谓喂蟽蟿喂魏萎 魏伪喂 蠅渭萎 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪, 伪位畏胃喂谓萎 魏伪喂 蔚尉慰蟻纬喂蟽蟿喂魏萎,纬蟻伪渭渭苇谓畏 渭蔚 位蠀蟻喂蟽渭蠈 魏伪喂 魏慰蠁蟿蔚蟻萎 蟺蔚蟻喂纬蟻伪蠁萎,蟿蠈蟽慰 苇谓蟿慰谓畏 魏伪喂 蟿蟻伪纬喂魏萎 蟺慰蠀 蟽慰蠀 未畏渭喂慰蠀蟻纬蔚委 伪蟺慰蟿蟻慰蟺喂伪蟽渭蠈 魏伪喂 慰蟻纬萎.
螠喂伪 螜谓未萎 谓蔚伪蟻萎 纬蠀谓伪委魏伪 蔚蟺喂蟽蟿蟻苇蠁蔚喂 蟽蟿慰 蟺伪蟿蟻喂魏蠈 蟿畏蟼 渭蔚蟿维 伪蟺慰 苇谓伪谓 伪蟺慰蟿蠀蠂畏渭苇谓慰 纬维渭慰 渭伪味委 渭蔚 蟿伪 未委未蠀渭伪 蔚蟺蟿维蠂蟻慰谓伪 蟺伪喂未维魏喂伪 蟿畏蟼. 螆谓伪 伪纬慰蟻维魏喂 魏伪喂 苇谓伪 魏慰蟻喂蟿蟽维魏喂 蟺慰蠀 未蔚谓 渭慰喂维味慰蠀谓 魏伪胃蠈位慰蠀 蟽蟿畏谓 蔚渭蠁维谓喂蟽畏 蠈渭蠅蟼 苇蠂慰蠀谓 魏慰喂谓萎 蠄蠀蠂萎,魏慰喂谓蠈 渭蠀伪位蠈,魏慰喂谓萎 渭慰委蟻伪 蟺慰蠀 蟿伪 魏伪蟿伪未喂魏维味蔚喂 蟽蔚 胃蠉蟿蔚蟼 魏伪喂 胃蠉渭伪蟿伪 蟺伪蟻维位位畏位伪.
螚 蔚蟺喂蟽蟿蟻慰蠁萎 蟽蟿慰 蟺伪蟿蟻喂魏蠈 蟽蟺委蟿喂 魏伪喂 蟿慰 未喂伪味蠉纬喂慰 未畏渭喂慰蠀蟻纬慰蠉谓 蟽魏维谓未伪位慰 魏伪喂 蟽蠂蠈位喂伪 蟽蟿畏 蟽维蟺喂伪 魏慰喂谓蠅谓委伪 蟿畏蟼 螜谓未委伪蟼 蟺慰蠀 蠂蠅蟻喂蟽渭苇谓畏 蟽蔚 未蠀慰 魏维蟽蟿蔚蟼, 蟿慰蠀蟼 "魏伪胃伪蟻慰蠉蟼" 魏伪喂 蟿慰蠀蟼 "维胃喂魏蟿慰蠀蟼" 伪蟺慰蟿蔚位蔚委 蟿慰 蟽魏畏谓喂魏蠈 蟿畏蟼 蟿蟻伪纬蠅未委伪蟼.
螣喂 "魏伪胃伪蟻慰委" 蔚委谓伪喂 畏 伪谓蠋蟿蔚蟻畏 魏慰喂谓蠅谓喂魏萎 蟿维尉畏, 蠂蟻喂蟽蟿喂伪谓喂魏蠋谓 伪蟻蠂蠋谓 魏伪喂 魏蟻蠀渭渭苇谓畏蟼 蟽伪蟺委位伪蟼 畏胃蠋谓 魏伪喂 伪尉喂蠋谓 渭苇蟽伪 蟽蔚 伪纬纬位蠈蠁喂位伪 蔚蠀蟻蠉蠂蠅蟻伪 魏伪喂 蔚蟺喂蠁伪谓蔚喂伪魏维 蟺慰位喂蟿喂蟽渭苇谓伪 蟽蟺委蟿喂伪.
螣喂 "维胃喂魏蟿慰喂" 蔚委谓伪喂 畏 魏伪蟿蠋蟿蔚蟻畏 位伪蠆魏萎 渭维味伪. 螣喂 喂谓未慰蠀喂蟽蟿苇蟼-魏慰渭渭慰蠀谓喂蟽蟿苇蟼 蟿畏蟼 蠄蔚蠉蟿喂魏畏蟼 魏伪喂 蟽蟿畏渭苇谓畏蟼 蔚蟺伪谓维蟽蟿伪蟽畏蟼. 螣喂 蔚蟻纬维蟿蔚蟼-未慰蠉位慰喂,蟿伪 渭喂维蟽渭伪蟿伪 蟿畏蟼 魏慰喂谓蠅谓委伪蟼 蟺慰蠀 伪蟺伪纬慰蟻蔚蠉蔚蟿伪喂 伪魏蠈渭畏 魏伪喂 谓伪 魏慰喂蟿维尉慰蠀谓 魏维蟺慰喂慰谓 "魏伪胃伪蟻蠈" 魏伪喂 蔚蟺喂尾维位位蔚蟿伪喂 谓伪 蟽魏慰蠀蟺委味慰蠀谓 伪蟺慰 蟿慰 未蟻蠈渭慰 伪魏蠈渭畏 魏伪喂 蟿伪 委蠂谓畏 蟿慰蠀蟼 渭畏谓 蟿蠀蠂蠈谓 魏伪喂 未喂伪蟽蟿伪蠀蟻蠅胃慰蠉谓 渭蔚 魏维蟺慰喂慰谓 蟿畏蟼 魏伪胃伪蟻萎蟼 魏维蟽蟿伪蟼 魏伪喂 蟿慰谓 渭慰位蠉谓慰蠀谓.
韦伪 未委未蠀渭伪 伪谓萎魏慰蠀谓 蟽蟿畏谓 伪谓蠋蟿蔚蟻畏 魏维蟽蟿伪. 螘委谓伪喂 蟽蔚 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂伪 "魏伪胃伪蟻蠋谓" 蟿委蟿位蠅谓 魏伪喂 未喂魏伪喂蠅渭维蟿蠅谓, 蠈渭蠅蟼 慰喂 蠄蠀蠂苇蟼 魏伪喂 蟿伪 蟺喂蟽蟿蔚蠉蠅 蟿蠅谓 蟽蠀纬纬蔚谓蠋谓 蟿慰蠀蟼 蟺慰蟿委味慰蠀谓 蟿喂蟼 蟺伪喂未喂魏苇蟼 味蠅苇蟼 渭蔚 尉蠉未喂 魏伪喂 蠂慰位萎. 螘蟺蔚喂未萎 蟿伪 蔚纬魏伪蟿苇位蔚喂蠄蔚 慰 蟺伪蟿苇蟻伪蟼 蟿慰蠀蟼, 蔚蟺蔚喂未萎 蠅蟼 纬蠀谓伪委魏伪 畏 渭畏蟿苇蟻伪 蟿慰蠀蟼 未蔚谓 伪尉喂蠋谓蔚喂 蟿委蟺慰蟿伪 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 蟺蔚蟻喂慰蠀蟽委伪 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 蟽蠀渭蟺蠈谓慰喂伪 蟿蠅谓 蟽蠀纬纬蔚谓蠋谓.
螠苇蟽伪 蟽蔚 伪蠀蟿蠈 蟿慰 蟺蔚蟻喂尾维位位慰谓 蟿畏蟼 纬蔚谓喂魏萎蟼 蔚尉伪胃位委蠅蟽畏蟼 伪蟻蠂委味慰蠀谓 魏伪喂 慰喂 蟺蔚蟻喂蟺苇蟿蔚喂蔚蟼 伪蠀蟿萎蟼 蟿畏蟼 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂伪蟼.
螒蟺委蟽蟿蔚蠀蟿蔚蟼 蟺蔚蟻喂纬蟻伪蠁苇蟼,蟺位畏渭渭蠉蟻伪 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃畏渭维蟿蠅谓,蟿蟻慰渭蔚蟻萎 蔚谓伪位位伪纬萎 蠂蟻慰谓喂魏蠋谓 蟺蔚蟻喂蠈未蠅谓,蔚魏蟺位畏魏蟿喂魏慰委 蠂伪蟻伪魏蟿畏蟻蔚蟼 畏蟻蠋蠅谓 蟺慰蠀 蟿慰蠀蟼 位伪蟿蟻蔚蠉蔚喂蟼 魏伪喂 蟿慰蠀蟼 胃伪蠀渭维味蔚喂蟼 萎 蟿慰蠀蟼 渭喂蟽蔚委蟼 胃伪谓维蟽喂渭伪.
螚 魏慰蟻蠉蠁蠅蟽畏 蟿畏蟼 蟺位慰魏萎蟼 纬委谓蔚蟿伪喂 蠈蟿伪谓 畏 未喂伪味蔚蠀纬渭苇谓畏 渭畏蟿苇蟻伪 蟿蠅谓 蟽伪蟿伪谓喂魏维 伪纬纬蔚位喂魏蠋谓 未喂未蠉渭蠅谓 蔚蟻蠅蟿蔚蠉蔚蟿伪喂 苇谓伪谓 "维胃喂魏蟿慰". 螆谓伪谓 蠀蟺苇蟻慰蠂慰 维谓胃蟻蠅蟺慰 蟺慰蠀 蔚谓蟽伪蟻魏蠋谓蔚喂 蟿畏谓 伪纬维蟺畏 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 蟿伪蟺蔚喂谓蠈蟿畏蟿伪 蟽蔚 蔚谓伪 渭蔚纬伪位蔚委慰 蠄蠀蠂萎蟼.
螒魏慰位慰蠀胃慰蠉谓 未蠀慰 胃维谓伪蟿慰喂 蟺慰蠀 蟽畏渭伪未蔚蠉慰蠀谓 蟿伪 蟺伪喂未喂维 纬喂伪 蟺维谓蟿伪 魏伪喂 纬委谓慰谓蟿伪喂 畏 伪喂蟿委伪 谓伪 蠂蠅蟻喂蟽蟿慰蠉谓 蟿伪 伪未苇位蠁喂伪,蟿慰蠀位维蠂喂蟽蟿慰谓 蟽蠅渭伪蟿喂魏维.
螠蔚蟿维 伪蟺慰 蟺慰位位维 蠂蟻蠈谓喂伪 魏伪喂 蟿蟻慰渭蔚蟻苇蟼 伪谓伪蟿蟻慰蟺苇蟼 蟿畏蟼 渭慰委蟻伪蟼, 蟿伪 未委未蠀渭伪 蟽蠀谓伪谓蟿慰蠉谓蟿伪喂 尉伪谓维 蟽蟿慰 蟺伪位喂蠈 蟺伪蟿蟻喂魏蠈.
螇蟿伪谓 尉苇谓慰喂 渭伪 蔚委蠂伪谓 纬谓蠅蟻喂蟽蟿蔚委 蟺蟻喂谓 伪蟻蠂委蟽蔚喂 畏 味蠅萎.
韦喂 谓伪 蟺慰蠀谓; 螠蠈谓慰 未维魏蟻蠀伪 蠀蟺萎蟻蠂伪谓 魏伪喂 蠁蟻喂蠂蟿萎 胃位委蠄畏.
螕喂伪 维位位畏 渭喂伪 蠁慰蟻维 魏伪蟿伪蟺伪蟿慰蠉谓 蟿慰蠀蟼 谓蠈渭慰蠀蟼 蟿畏蟼 伪纬维蟺畏蟼. 螖蔚谓 蟿慰蠀蟼 苇渭伪胃蔚 魏伪谓蔚喂蟼 蟺慰蠀 魏伪谓慰谓委味慰蠀谓 蟺慰喂慰蟼 蟺蟻苇蟺蔚喂 谓伪 伪纬伪蟺畏胃蔚委. 螝伪喂 蟺蠅蟼...螝伪喂 蟺蠈蟽慰...
螝伪位萎 伪谓维纬谓蠅蟽畏.
螤慰位位慰蠉蟼 伪蟽蟺伪蟽渭慰蠉蟼.
螘委渭伪蟽蟿蔚 蟽蟿慰 蠂蠅蟻喂蠈 螒纬喂伪渭伪谓维渭 蟿畏蟼 螝蔚蟻维位伪蟼 蟽蟿畏谓 螜谓未委伪.
危蔚 渭喂伪 螜谓未委伪 蔚尉伪胃位喂蠅渭苇谓畏,渭委味蔚蟻畏,蠁蟿蠅蠂萎 魏伪喂 尾蟻蠈渭喂魏畏 蟺慰蠀 尾蟻维味蔚喂 纬喂伪 魏慰喂谓蠅谓喂魏苇蟼 魏伪喂 蟺慰位喂蟿喂魏苇蟼 伪位位伪纬苇蟼. 螕喂伪 魏伪位蠉蟿蔚蟻慰 蟿蟻蠈蟺慰 味蠅萎蟼,纬喂伪 伪谓胃蟻蠋蟺喂谓伪 未喂魏伪喂蠋渭伪蟿伪,纬喂伪 蔚喂蟻萎谓畏,未畏渭慰魏蟻伪蟿委伪,喂蟽蠈蟿畏蟿伪.
螠喂伪 蟽蠀纬魏位慰谓喂蟽蟿喂魏萎 魏伪喂 蠅渭萎 喂蟽蟿慰蟻委伪, 伪位畏胃喂谓萎 魏伪喂 蔚尉慰蟻纬喂蟽蟿喂魏萎,纬蟻伪渭渭苇谓畏 渭蔚 位蠀蟻喂蟽渭蠈 魏伪喂 魏慰蠁蟿蔚蟻萎 蟺蔚蟻喂纬蟻伪蠁萎,蟿蠈蟽慰 苇谓蟿慰谓畏 魏伪喂 蟿蟻伪纬喂魏萎 蟺慰蠀 蟽慰蠀 未畏渭喂慰蠀蟻纬蔚委 伪蟺慰蟿蟻慰蟺喂伪蟽渭蠈 魏伪喂 慰蟻纬萎.
螠喂伪 螜谓未萎 谓蔚伪蟻萎 纬蠀谓伪委魏伪 蔚蟺喂蟽蟿蟻苇蠁蔚喂 蟽蟿慰 蟺伪蟿蟻喂魏蠈 蟿畏蟼 渭蔚蟿维 伪蟺慰 苇谓伪谓 伪蟺慰蟿蠀蠂畏渭苇谓慰 纬维渭慰 渭伪味委 渭蔚 蟿伪 未委未蠀渭伪 蔚蟺蟿维蠂蟻慰谓伪 蟺伪喂未维魏喂伪 蟿畏蟼. 螆谓伪 伪纬慰蟻维魏喂 魏伪喂 苇谓伪 魏慰蟻喂蟿蟽维魏喂 蟺慰蠀 未蔚谓 渭慰喂维味慰蠀谓 魏伪胃蠈位慰蠀 蟽蟿畏谓 蔚渭蠁维谓喂蟽畏 蠈渭蠅蟼 苇蠂慰蠀谓 魏慰喂谓萎 蠄蠀蠂萎,魏慰喂谓蠈 渭蠀伪位蠈,魏慰喂谓萎 渭慰委蟻伪 蟺慰蠀 蟿伪 魏伪蟿伪未喂魏维味蔚喂 蟽蔚 胃蠉蟿蔚蟼 魏伪喂 胃蠉渭伪蟿伪 蟺伪蟻维位位畏位伪.
螚 蔚蟺喂蟽蟿蟻慰蠁萎 蟽蟿慰 蟺伪蟿蟻喂魏蠈 蟽蟺委蟿喂 魏伪喂 蟿慰 未喂伪味蠉纬喂慰 未畏渭喂慰蠀蟻纬慰蠉谓 蟽魏维谓未伪位慰 魏伪喂 蟽蠂蠈位喂伪 蟽蟿畏 蟽维蟺喂伪 魏慰喂谓蠅谓委伪 蟿畏蟼 螜谓未委伪蟼 蟺慰蠀 蠂蠅蟻喂蟽渭苇谓畏 蟽蔚 未蠀慰 魏维蟽蟿蔚蟼, 蟿慰蠀蟼 "魏伪胃伪蟻慰蠉蟼" 魏伪喂 蟿慰蠀蟼 "维胃喂魏蟿慰蠀蟼" 伪蟺慰蟿蔚位蔚委 蟿慰 蟽魏畏谓喂魏蠈 蟿畏蟼 蟿蟻伪纬蠅未委伪蟼.
螣喂 "魏伪胃伪蟻慰委" 蔚委谓伪喂 畏 伪谓蠋蟿蔚蟻畏 魏慰喂谓蠅谓喂魏萎 蟿维尉畏, 蠂蟻喂蟽蟿喂伪谓喂魏蠋谓 伪蟻蠂蠋谓 魏伪喂 魏蟻蠀渭渭苇谓畏蟼 蟽伪蟺委位伪蟼 畏胃蠋谓 魏伪喂 伪尉喂蠋谓 渭苇蟽伪 蟽蔚 伪纬纬位蠈蠁喂位伪 蔚蠀蟻蠉蠂蠅蟻伪 魏伪喂 蔚蟺喂蠁伪谓蔚喂伪魏维 蟺慰位喂蟿喂蟽渭苇谓伪 蟽蟺委蟿喂伪.
螣喂 "维胃喂魏蟿慰喂" 蔚委谓伪喂 畏 魏伪蟿蠋蟿蔚蟻畏 位伪蠆魏萎 渭维味伪. 螣喂 喂谓未慰蠀喂蟽蟿苇蟼-魏慰渭渭慰蠀谓喂蟽蟿苇蟼 蟿畏蟼 蠄蔚蠉蟿喂魏畏蟼 魏伪喂 蟽蟿畏渭苇谓畏蟼 蔚蟺伪谓维蟽蟿伪蟽畏蟼. 螣喂 蔚蟻纬维蟿蔚蟼-未慰蠉位慰喂,蟿伪 渭喂维蟽渭伪蟿伪 蟿畏蟼 魏慰喂谓蠅谓委伪蟼 蟺慰蠀 伪蟺伪纬慰蟻蔚蠉蔚蟿伪喂 伪魏蠈渭畏 魏伪喂 谓伪 魏慰喂蟿维尉慰蠀谓 魏维蟺慰喂慰谓 "魏伪胃伪蟻蠈" 魏伪喂 蔚蟺喂尾维位位蔚蟿伪喂 谓伪 蟽魏慰蠀蟺委味慰蠀谓 伪蟺慰 蟿慰 未蟻蠈渭慰 伪魏蠈渭畏 魏伪喂 蟿伪 委蠂谓畏 蟿慰蠀蟼 渭畏谓 蟿蠀蠂蠈谓 魏伪喂 未喂伪蟽蟿伪蠀蟻蠅胃慰蠉谓 渭蔚 魏维蟺慰喂慰谓 蟿畏蟼 魏伪胃伪蟻萎蟼 魏维蟽蟿伪蟼 魏伪喂 蟿慰谓 渭慰位蠉谓慰蠀谓.
韦伪 未委未蠀渭伪 伪谓萎魏慰蠀谓 蟽蟿畏谓 伪谓蠋蟿蔚蟻畏 魏维蟽蟿伪. 螘委谓伪喂 蟽蔚 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂伪 "魏伪胃伪蟻蠋谓" 蟿委蟿位蠅谓 魏伪喂 未喂魏伪喂蠅渭维蟿蠅谓, 蠈渭蠅蟼 慰喂 蠄蠀蠂苇蟼 魏伪喂 蟿伪 蟺喂蟽蟿蔚蠉蠅 蟿蠅谓 蟽蠀纬纬蔚谓蠋谓 蟿慰蠀蟼 蟺慰蟿委味慰蠀谓 蟿喂蟼 蟺伪喂未喂魏苇蟼 味蠅苇蟼 渭蔚 尉蠉未喂 魏伪喂 蠂慰位萎. 螘蟺蔚喂未萎 蟿伪 蔚纬魏伪蟿苇位蔚喂蠄蔚 慰 蟺伪蟿苇蟻伪蟼 蟿慰蠀蟼, 蔚蟺蔚喂未萎 蠅蟼 纬蠀谓伪委魏伪 畏 渭畏蟿苇蟻伪 蟿慰蠀蟼 未蔚谓 伪尉喂蠋谓蔚喂 蟿委蟺慰蟿伪 伪蟺慰 蟿畏谓 蟺蔚蟻喂慰蠀蟽委伪 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 蟽蠀渭蟺蠈谓慰喂伪 蟿蠅谓 蟽蠀纬纬蔚谓蠋谓.
螠苇蟽伪 蟽蔚 伪蠀蟿蠈 蟿慰 蟺蔚蟻喂尾维位位慰谓 蟿畏蟼 纬蔚谓喂魏萎蟼 蔚尉伪胃位委蠅蟽畏蟼 伪蟻蠂委味慰蠀谓 魏伪喂 慰喂 蟺蔚蟻喂蟺苇蟿蔚喂蔚蟼 伪蠀蟿萎蟼 蟿畏蟼 慰喂魏慰纬苇谓蔚喂伪蟼.
螒蟺委蟽蟿蔚蠀蟿蔚蟼 蟺蔚蟻喂纬蟻伪蠁苇蟼,蟺位畏渭渭蠉蟻伪 蟽蠀谓伪喂蟽胃畏渭维蟿蠅谓,蟿蟻慰渭蔚蟻萎 蔚谓伪位位伪纬萎 蠂蟻慰谓喂魏蠋谓 蟺蔚蟻喂蠈未蠅谓,蔚魏蟺位畏魏蟿喂魏慰委 蠂伪蟻伪魏蟿畏蟻蔚蟼 畏蟻蠋蠅谓 蟺慰蠀 蟿慰蠀蟼 位伪蟿蟻蔚蠉蔚喂蟼 魏伪喂 蟿慰蠀蟼 胃伪蠀渭维味蔚喂蟼 萎 蟿慰蠀蟼 渭喂蟽蔚委蟼 胃伪谓维蟽喂渭伪.
螚 魏慰蟻蠉蠁蠅蟽畏 蟿畏蟼 蟺位慰魏萎蟼 纬委谓蔚蟿伪喂 蠈蟿伪谓 畏 未喂伪味蔚蠀纬渭苇谓畏 渭畏蟿苇蟻伪 蟿蠅谓 蟽伪蟿伪谓喂魏维 伪纬纬蔚位喂魏蠋谓 未喂未蠉渭蠅谓 蔚蟻蠅蟿蔚蠉蔚蟿伪喂 苇谓伪谓 "维胃喂魏蟿慰". 螆谓伪谓 蠀蟺苇蟻慰蠂慰 维谓胃蟻蠅蟺慰 蟺慰蠀 蔚谓蟽伪蟻魏蠋谓蔚喂 蟿畏谓 伪纬维蟺畏 魏伪喂 蟿畏谓 蟿伪蟺蔚喂谓蠈蟿畏蟿伪 蟽蔚 蔚谓伪 渭蔚纬伪位蔚委慰 蠄蠀蠂萎蟼.
螒魏慰位慰蠀胃慰蠉谓 未蠀慰 胃维谓伪蟿慰喂 蟺慰蠀 蟽畏渭伪未蔚蠉慰蠀谓 蟿伪 蟺伪喂未喂维 纬喂伪 蟺维谓蟿伪 魏伪喂 纬委谓慰谓蟿伪喂 畏 伪喂蟿委伪 谓伪 蠂蠅蟻喂蟽蟿慰蠉谓 蟿伪 伪未苇位蠁喂伪,蟿慰蠀位维蠂喂蟽蟿慰谓 蟽蠅渭伪蟿喂魏维.
螠蔚蟿维 伪蟺慰 蟺慰位位维 蠂蟻蠈谓喂伪 魏伪喂 蟿蟻慰渭蔚蟻苇蟼 伪谓伪蟿蟻慰蟺苇蟼 蟿畏蟼 渭慰委蟻伪蟼, 蟿伪 未委未蠀渭伪 蟽蠀谓伪谓蟿慰蠉谓蟿伪喂 尉伪谓维 蟽蟿慰 蟺伪位喂蠈 蟺伪蟿蟻喂魏蠈.
螇蟿伪谓 尉苇谓慰喂 渭伪 蔚委蠂伪谓 纬谓蠅蟻喂蟽蟿蔚委 蟺蟻喂谓 伪蟻蠂委蟽蔚喂 畏 味蠅萎.
韦喂 谓伪 蟺慰蠀谓; 螠蠈谓慰 未维魏蟻蠀伪 蠀蟺萎蟻蠂伪谓 魏伪喂 蠁蟻喂蠂蟿萎 胃位委蠄畏.
螕喂伪 维位位畏 渭喂伪 蠁慰蟻维 魏伪蟿伪蟺伪蟿慰蠉谓 蟿慰蠀蟼 谓蠈渭慰蠀蟼 蟿畏蟼 伪纬维蟺畏蟼. 螖蔚谓 蟿慰蠀蟼 苇渭伪胃蔚 魏伪谓蔚喂蟼 蟺慰蠀 魏伪谓慰谓委味慰蠀谓 蟺慰喂慰蟼 蟺蟻苇蟺蔚喂 谓伪 伪纬伪蟺畏胃蔚委. 螝伪喂 蟺蠅蟼...螝伪喂 蟺蠈蟽慰...
螝伪位萎 伪谓维纬谓蠅蟽畏.
螤慰位位慰蠉蟼 伪蟽蟺伪蟽渭慰蠉蟼.
June 21, 2018
3.5
I usually love books that are set in the Indian subcontinent but found this one frustrating to be honest.
On the one hand it was a tour de force of sumptuous prose, but on the other I found that the narrative meandered all over the place, making it difficult to for me (with my grasshopper brain) to keep up.
Although Roy's writing is kissed by the gods, I'm a great believer in a story's need to flow and my early enthusiasm became steadily dampened as the book progressed.
I usually love books that are set in the Indian subcontinent but found this one frustrating to be honest.
On the one hand it was a tour de force of sumptuous prose, but on the other I found that the narrative meandered all over the place, making it difficult to for me (with my grasshopper brain) to keep up.
Although Roy's writing is kissed by the gods, I'm a great believer in a story's need to flow and my early enthusiasm became steadily dampened as the book progressed.
January 27, 2024
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, is a fantastic book. It takes place in a town in India called Ayemenem. It is about a family and how they deal with their day-to-day life. Rahel and Estha, the main characters, are twins who are always getting into trouble with their mom, Ammu. It tells about their life in India and how their government and society work. They own a Pickle factory, so Rahel and Estha's family is known as a "touchable" family. Since they are touchable, they are not allowed to talk to or do with the untouchables." You will later find out that this is a problem in the story. This story tells about how they grew up with the issues they had when they were little, like when one of the characters gets sexually abused, he has to deal with it his whole life, and it tells about his struggle. This book is a page-turner and is easy to read. However, it sometimes gets confusing because some of the chapters are flashbacks. I would recommend this book more to girls, but boys would enjoy it, too.
June 19, 2020
There was no reasoning with this book. It caught me with its word-shaped eyes and wanted to lock horns. It threw me to the ground and thrashed me every time I picked it up. During some of these thrashings I came out on top, but most of the time I was overwhelmed by the book鈥檚 overpowering strength in spite of its meager spine. In the last match, as if it had been training me, I overcame the book. I had naught to do but reflect upon the struggle that had brought me to slamming shut the final pages in victory and
I Found Myself Confused
In the wake of this book I found myself asking a question I had asked myself before, but never properly answered. Not to say that I will answer it properly here. Not to say that there is a proper answer. The question:
Can I forgive a book for a painful read if it pays off in the end?
My fianc茅 gifted Arundhati Roy鈥檚 The God of Small Things to me for Christmas because:
a) It was a Booker Prize Winner
b) It was written by an author not from Canada, the US, or the UK.
c) She read reviews that both praised and bemoaned this book
She knows me well! Indeed, the book hit a lot of my personal tick-boxes. The God of Small Things had been on my radar for a long time and as I settled in to the first chapter I was blown away by how difficult it was to follow. The writing, floral and descriptive, was of such density that I was taken aback. Of course, this subsided after a while and I became adjusted to Roy鈥檚 prose. With that said, there鈥檚 a lot going on and it isn鈥檛 explained in a manner that could be described as linear.
The story starts, stops, and jumps around with enough regularity that it almost demanded to be read it long sittings. Roy slips backwards in time within paragraphs, at times forcing me to go back and read what I had just read to make sure I was interpreting the passage correctly. Roy also jumps around between characters frequently. Since she playfully gives her characters variations on their names or uses parts of the story that have passed to inform their description, it can be tough to get a handle on the cast.
But once you let go of your expectations and go along for the ride, the book has many rewarding qualities. The characters are each well developed, understandable, and are tied together by a shared fate. Though the novel read as disjointed throughout, Roy brings everything together quite well. The novel鈥檚 first chapter serves as an odd synopsis that is obscure enough that you wouldn鈥檛 be able to point out its intricacies, only identify the major tragedies. The character-driven plot becomes rewarding when the artifice of the fragmented timeline is laid bare by the novel鈥檚 end. Whether or not that reward is worth the strain is another topic.
Certainly, it isn鈥檛 all strain. Roy took home the Booker Prize in 1997 for this novel, and it is easy to see why it might have come out on top. It has a unique format, but more importantly, really, really attractive, if extravagant, writing. Some of the descriptions in this novel are so vivid that they鈥檒l have you basking in their beauty and horror. In that way Roy has done an impressive thing: shown the beauty and the terror inherent in the real world. Of course, it also makes for an exhausting read.
I鈥檓 sure reader opinion will vary on this one since appreciation of style is such a subjective matter, but Roy鈥檚 prose both works for and against her. It makes for some pretty mind pictures, no doubt. It also had me putting down the book to take a break more often than I do with novels. The book is layered with metaphor, endlessly self-referential, and sometimes obscure enough that I鈥檒l admit, unembarrassed, that I had no idea what it was supposed to mean.
So, did the tying together of everything justify the reading? Well, certainly I鈥檝e learned things from the reading about prose that are beneficial. However, the struggle never made me feel rewarded like I have been with other challenging works. There鈥檚 a lot of beauty and great thought to behold in this novel of India, but I always felt a little removed from the proceedings. Somewhere amidst a struggle with stream of consciousness, appreciation of writing, bafflement at a timeline, and enjoyable characters you'll find my opinion.
I Found Myself Confused
In the wake of this book I found myself asking a question I had asked myself before, but never properly answered. Not to say that I will answer it properly here. Not to say that there is a proper answer. The question:
Can I forgive a book for a painful read if it pays off in the end?
My fianc茅 gifted Arundhati Roy鈥檚 The God of Small Things to me for Christmas because:
a) It was a Booker Prize Winner
b) It was written by an author not from Canada, the US, or the UK.
c) She read reviews that both praised and bemoaned this book
She knows me well! Indeed, the book hit a lot of my personal tick-boxes. The God of Small Things had been on my radar for a long time and as I settled in to the first chapter I was blown away by how difficult it was to follow. The writing, floral and descriptive, was of such density that I was taken aback. Of course, this subsided after a while and I became adjusted to Roy鈥檚 prose. With that said, there鈥檚 a lot going on and it isn鈥檛 explained in a manner that could be described as linear.
The story starts, stops, and jumps around with enough regularity that it almost demanded to be read it long sittings. Roy slips backwards in time within paragraphs, at times forcing me to go back and read what I had just read to make sure I was interpreting the passage correctly. Roy also jumps around between characters frequently. Since she playfully gives her characters variations on their names or uses parts of the story that have passed to inform their description, it can be tough to get a handle on the cast.
But once you let go of your expectations and go along for the ride, the book has many rewarding qualities. The characters are each well developed, understandable, and are tied together by a shared fate. Though the novel read as disjointed throughout, Roy brings everything together quite well. The novel鈥檚 first chapter serves as an odd synopsis that is obscure enough that you wouldn鈥檛 be able to point out its intricacies, only identify the major tragedies. The character-driven plot becomes rewarding when the artifice of the fragmented timeline is laid bare by the novel鈥檚 end. Whether or not that reward is worth the strain is another topic.
Certainly, it isn鈥檛 all strain. Roy took home the Booker Prize in 1997 for this novel, and it is easy to see why it might have come out on top. It has a unique format, but more importantly, really, really attractive, if extravagant, writing. Some of the descriptions in this novel are so vivid that they鈥檒l have you basking in their beauty and horror. In that way Roy has done an impressive thing: shown the beauty and the terror inherent in the real world. Of course, it also makes for an exhausting read.
I鈥檓 sure reader opinion will vary on this one since appreciation of style is such a subjective matter, but Roy鈥檚 prose both works for and against her. It makes for some pretty mind pictures, no doubt. It also had me putting down the book to take a break more often than I do with novels. The book is layered with metaphor, endlessly self-referential, and sometimes obscure enough that I鈥檒l admit, unembarrassed, that I had no idea what it was supposed to mean.
So, did the tying together of everything justify the reading? Well, certainly I鈥檝e learned things from the reading about prose that are beneficial. However, the struggle never made me feel rewarded like I have been with other challenging works. There鈥檚 a lot of beauty and great thought to behold in this novel of India, but I always felt a little removed from the proceedings. Somewhere amidst a struggle with stream of consciousness, appreciation of writing, bafflement at a timeline, and enjoyable characters you'll find my opinion.
November 28, 2018
At times, we suffer more from memory than the past action, we are haunted by the imagination more than reality, in a flash it鈥檚 gone, and we carry the heartache of 鈥渨hat if鈥� for a lifetime to our heart, We repeat in our mind, tens and hundreds of things to say instead, we imagine infinite remaking of a vision that has gone with the wind, like two lovers of night who meet at a distant bay, trembling with the fear of what lays ahead, and pleasure of anticipation, both hesitant and hasty,loveres fall in a frenzy of incoherent movements, rapidly exhausting each other, now they lie down strangled still, drained and brimmed all at the same ,as they hear the clinking melody of their battered breaths, and at day break, the lovers get apart, with memories of scents,breaths,crunched leaves and a short-spanned haven, fresh in their mind like bleeding wounds, 'Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day鈥� lovers become strangers and tomorrow never comes.
What comes is the memory, of a long gone face, of a broken smile, of a silenced voice in a dark cell, a man, an untouchable pravaan,a communist of lowly cast, the shimmering swimmer of the waters of passion who leave no footprints when walks in dark, the man of big heart, the God of small things. I never have happened to dislike a book鈥檚 narrative to the extent of leaving it unfinished twice, and never have I been so tormented by the fate of some fictional character to the extent of changing it repeatedly in my frenzied head, It wasn鈥檛 supposed to be this achingly beautiful and sensually agonizing. The whole air of the book is blue, ironically, there鈥檚 nothing apparent to mourn for, no higher-than-sky tragedy befalls, only the Law of Love鈥檚 broken, laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.鈥� And consequently, the outlaws been disciplined to correct what鈥檚 gone irrevocably wrong.
Still, I struggle with the pronunciation of characters鈥� names, I find no prudent purpose for interweaving narrative that seems out of place at places, had it been not for the melancholic aura of characters that blankets them and the wistful style of unveiling froth events, the novel could easily be reckoned as a work of gimmicks. The vague incest between twins, darts the attention away from the murky flow of the story,Book is encumbered with coinages and innovative phrases that only add to frustration on the part of reader that is fueled by the never-ending elaborations of the words used.
Bigotry has to be uprooted at the basis immediate as is done filtration of the air, in places contaminated with plague, we have to become receptive, or indifferent in the attempt, at the very least, to save the Gods of small things!
What comes is the memory, of a long gone face, of a broken smile, of a silenced voice in a dark cell, a man, an untouchable pravaan,a communist of lowly cast, the shimmering swimmer of the waters of passion who leave no footprints when walks in dark, the man of big heart, the God of small things. I never have happened to dislike a book鈥檚 narrative to the extent of leaving it unfinished twice, and never have I been so tormented by the fate of some fictional character to the extent of changing it repeatedly in my frenzied head, It wasn鈥檛 supposed to be this achingly beautiful and sensually agonizing. The whole air of the book is blue, ironically, there鈥檚 nothing apparent to mourn for, no higher-than-sky tragedy befalls, only the Law of Love鈥檚 broken, laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.鈥� And consequently, the outlaws been disciplined to correct what鈥檚 gone irrevocably wrong.
Still, I struggle with the pronunciation of characters鈥� names, I find no prudent purpose for interweaving narrative that seems out of place at places, had it been not for the melancholic aura of characters that blankets them and the wistful style of unveiling froth events, the novel could easily be reckoned as a work of gimmicks. The vague incest between twins, darts the attention away from the murky flow of the story,Book is encumbered with coinages and innovative phrases that only add to frustration on the part of reader that is fueled by the never-ending elaborations of the words used.
Bigotry has to be uprooted at the basis immediate as is done filtration of the air, in places contaminated with plague, we have to become receptive, or indifferent in the attempt, at the very least, to save the Gods of small things!
December 17, 2015
I recognize that when it comes to this book, platitudes are worth even less than usual when it comes to the conveyance of something with actual meaning. So on that note I will spare both you and I that. Instead, I will comfort myself in the core of metaphor, and go from there.
To say that this book resonated with me is akin to saying that ingestion of arsenic does a decent job of causing multi-system organ failure. To say that I read it at the right time is akin to saying that the added latex to the cord did a decent job of being the exact amount required to turn a free fall finality into a sustained oscillation, one that is holding strong to this day. To say that it changed my life forever is too easy and too simple, for it鈥檚 taken me four years to come back to it and realize how pervasively the thematic pulses have suffused by sensibilities, and how differently it could have gone had they not.
Rather than spill guts that are still too close for me to speak of in comfortably distanced terms, I will simply say that on the first day of this rereading, I went back after finishing and played video games until I could trust myself with serious mental activity again, for if there's one thing I've learned from 'Infinite Jest' is that, sometimes, thinking your way out of something is the worst decision you could possibly make. But before that, I wrote the above.
Now that I've finished, and have all the resources at my disposal, I can bring you this:
Tell me, how much resonance would these menacing Facts of Life have, Facts that are as rampant in India as they are in America, will continue to be so anywhere as long as humanity crawls and craves its way across this modern day society of ours, if any of these escapes had succeeded in bringing about content complacency? How many reviews have I read that mentioned Tragedy of it All, an emotional dagger that will latch on in grim urgency when everything else has faded to a brief recollection of word and thought, guarantee a remembrance of pain if nothing else? About as many as I've read that mentioned the Prose.
The Prose. Something I believe set the stage for how far I was drawn into this novel, unconsciously resonating with the viewpoint it conveys. For of all the books I have read over the years, and I have read many, there are very, very few that I can think of that look at children in terms of reality. Not childhood. Childhood is a substitute for serious thought that individuals with a respectable amount of years behind them love to use instead of considering those smaller, briefer in accumulated existence individuals. Reality is what all human beings swim through from day one, and there are no mandates that the early years of that swimming will be kind ones. 'The Instructions' realizes this instruction in full, and so does this.
Never does the reader observe an indulgent pandering to the senses of the smaller ones when the story delves into History, Literature, Politics, Culture, and all the constrictions that overlay whatever life they have been granted. All that these smaller ones truly lack is enough experience with the darker sides of all these things to make them complacently seek a spot in life that requires no curiosity, no discovery, no fumbling in the dark.
Complacency, in reaction to fear of Unexpected Consequences.
Without these, they see the world in weird and wonderful fashions, not yet attuned to what must be looked at, what must be covered up, and how best to go about said covering up. And thus, you get the prose, a nauseatingly delicious mix of lush rankness as fertile undergrowth clambers up cold and unyielding civilization, a breeding whose resulting Beast of Burden is neither good, nor bad. It simply is.
Until, of course, humans get their hands on it. For it is up to humans to figure out how to use this world they have been given. Those who learn too late are, well. They should have known better.
There is no number of years required for complete loss of faith in every concept of redemption at the hands of family, friends, and familiar social setting clustered around an ideological stability. There is no standard age of accepting the fact that the Self is a blip with no entitlements to happiness, or that none of the standard handbooks for such Entitlements work. There is no length of existence where it is proscribed to demand that one make the decision of what value the Self has in its continued existence, and what it will take to maintain said existence. There is no amount of living that results in the realization that 'What It Will Take' will not necessarily coincide with any form of 'Sustainable Living'.
For a long time, I thought, it could be worse. Nowadays, I think, it could be better. Today, I take the Deposit of It Could Be Worse, and invest it in the Debt of It Could Be Better. My chosen methods of doing so have been met with surprised gestures at my age, perhaps unspoken surprised gestures at my gender, some days I have to wonder.
I look at this book, and think to myself, here's a lesson I learned long ago. I don't plan on wasting it by standing still.
To say that this book resonated with me is akin to saying that ingestion of arsenic does a decent job of causing multi-system organ failure. To say that I read it at the right time is akin to saying that the added latex to the cord did a decent job of being the exact amount required to turn a free fall finality into a sustained oscillation, one that is holding strong to this day. To say that it changed my life forever is too easy and too simple, for it鈥檚 taken me four years to come back to it and realize how pervasively the thematic pulses have suffused by sensibilities, and how differently it could have gone had they not.
Rather than spill guts that are still too close for me to speak of in comfortably distanced terms, I will simply say that on the first day of this rereading, I went back after finishing and played video games until I could trust myself with serious mental activity again, for if there's one thing I've learned from 'Infinite Jest' is that, sometimes, thinking your way out of something is the worst decision you could possibly make. But before that, I wrote the above.
Now that I've finished, and have all the resources at my disposal, I can bring you this:
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.It's absurdly hilarious, almost, how many times the book hurls its meaning at you in very discreetly concrete packages. Religion, culture, foreign relations, politics, family, belief, blood, and binding. It would come off as trite and pretentiously overdone, were it not for the systematic destruction of every storytelling methodology usually used to deliver such life lessons. Industrialization, information, travel, passionately, monetarily, and so many other pathways of escape usually offered up on the altar of the 'happy ending', or anything but a 'thoroughly debilitating reality of an ending', and the most popular, love. Love, its How and its How Much. But more important than all that is Growing Up. The Bildungsroman, the promise Time gives to its more helpless constituents. Or at least, a promise humanity likes to think exists.
Tell me, how much resonance would these menacing Facts of Life have, Facts that are as rampant in India as they are in America, will continue to be so anywhere as long as humanity crawls and craves its way across this modern day society of ours, if any of these escapes had succeeded in bringing about content complacency? How many reviews have I read that mentioned Tragedy of it All, an emotional dagger that will latch on in grim urgency when everything else has faded to a brief recollection of word and thought, guarantee a remembrance of pain if nothing else? About as many as I've read that mentioned the Prose.
The Prose. Something I believe set the stage for how far I was drawn into this novel, unconsciously resonating with the viewpoint it conveys. For of all the books I have read over the years, and I have read many, there are very, very few that I can think of that look at children in terms of reality. Not childhood. Childhood is a substitute for serious thought that individuals with a respectable amount of years behind them love to use instead of considering those smaller, briefer in accumulated existence individuals. Reality is what all human beings swim through from day one, and there are no mandates that the early years of that swimming will be kind ones. 'The Instructions' realizes this instruction in full, and so does this.
Never does the reader observe an indulgent pandering to the senses of the smaller ones when the story delves into History, Literature, Politics, Culture, and all the constrictions that overlay whatever life they have been granted. All that these smaller ones truly lack is enough experience with the darker sides of all these things to make them complacently seek a spot in life that requires no curiosity, no discovery, no fumbling in the dark.
Complacency, in reaction to fear of Unexpected Consequences.
Without these, they see the world in weird and wonderful fashions, not yet attuned to what must be looked at, what must be covered up, and how best to go about said covering up. And thus, you get the prose, a nauseatingly delicious mix of lush rankness as fertile undergrowth clambers up cold and unyielding civilization, a breeding whose resulting Beast of Burden is neither good, nor bad. It simply is.
Until, of course, humans get their hands on it. For it is up to humans to figure out how to use this world they have been given. Those who learn too late are, well. They should have known better.
There is no number of years required for complete loss of faith in every concept of redemption at the hands of family, friends, and familiar social setting clustered around an ideological stability. There is no standard age of accepting the fact that the Self is a blip with no entitlements to happiness, or that none of the standard handbooks for such Entitlements work. There is no length of existence where it is proscribed to demand that one make the decision of what value the Self has in its continued existence, and what it will take to maintain said existence. There is no amount of living that results in the realization that 'What It Will Take' will not necessarily coincide with any form of 'Sustainable Living'.
For a long time, I thought, it could be worse. Nowadays, I think, it could be better. Today, I take the Deposit of It Could Be Worse, and invest it in the Debt of It Could Be Better. My chosen methods of doing so have been met with surprised gestures at my age, perhaps unspoken surprised gestures at my gender, some days I have to wonder.
I look at this book, and think to myself, here's a lesson I learned long ago. I don't plan on wasting it by standing still.
December 17, 2007
Okay, it won the Booker prize and everyone has said it before - but god damn is this one melancholy piece of work, and that's actually why I like it.
It's melancholy, not depressing, and it answers more questions about the characters than it first seemed to, although, I have to say, the characters on the whole are quite two-dimensional. Then again, so are a lot of real people: this is an indictment of human life if ever I saw it.
The language is brilliant, the running together of words to form themes, the lack of any explanation when shifting around in time that isn't needed, because the style and/or perspective is changed so fluidly that it takes only half a second to readjust yourself. I think perhaps the pacing in the final quarter, leading up to The Incident, was the best piece of work I have read although one or two things seemed out of place, allowing us to guess too early what happens, once or twice.
Still, that adds to the picture we build, and assists the final drama in being oh-so-very dramatic.
My favourite/least favourite aspect of the story is the same exact thing: Baby Kochamma's fate. If you've read it you'll know that what she deserves she would deserve only at the hands of a gang of cops, but the way she spends the vast majority of her life, her unbending belief and continued pathetic existence, is actually her just punishment.
But by god I wanted to lean into the pages and throttle the hell out of her come the finish.
Anyway, yes it really is a magnificent book, fully deserving of all five stars, but while it isn't actually depressing, it is melancholy as hell.
Can't say enough about some of the characters because they are painted so richly, the two protagonists especially, but even though the actual events, while brutal, tragic and realistic in their consequences, are important and could very well devastate so many lives as the lives in this book were so devastated, they were hardly `epic` as so many reviewers like to claim.
Worse things happen at sea, still.
It's melancholy, not depressing, and it answers more questions about the characters than it first seemed to, although, I have to say, the characters on the whole are quite two-dimensional. Then again, so are a lot of real people: this is an indictment of human life if ever I saw it.
The language is brilliant, the running together of words to form themes, the lack of any explanation when shifting around in time that isn't needed, because the style and/or perspective is changed so fluidly that it takes only half a second to readjust yourself. I think perhaps the pacing in the final quarter, leading up to The Incident, was the best piece of work I have read although one or two things seemed out of place, allowing us to guess too early what happens, once or twice.
Still, that adds to the picture we build, and assists the final drama in being oh-so-very dramatic.
My favourite/least favourite aspect of the story is the same exact thing: Baby Kochamma's fate. If you've read it you'll know that what she deserves she would deserve only at the hands of a gang of cops, but the way she spends the vast majority of her life, her unbending belief and continued pathetic existence, is actually her just punishment.
But by god I wanted to lean into the pages and throttle the hell out of her come the finish.
Anyway, yes it really is a magnificent book, fully deserving of all five stars, but while it isn't actually depressing, it is melancholy as hell.
Can't say enough about some of the characters because they are painted so richly, the two protagonists especially, but even though the actual events, while brutal, tragic and realistic in their consequences, are important and could very well devastate so many lives as the lives in this book were so devastated, they were hardly `epic` as so many reviewers like to claim.
Worse things happen at sea, still.
September 27, 2024
"The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy unfurls like a melancholic hymn, weaving the fragility of human emotions with the relentless weight of societal expectations. Set in the verdant heart of Kerala, India, the novel traces the invisible tremors of small, fleeting moments鈥攎oments that ripple through time, shattering lives and leaving deep scars. Through this tapestry of love, loss, and caste-bound constraints, Roy paints a portrait of a family fractured by the quiet cruelty of the world around them, haunted by their own unspoken pain.
Rather than diving into the plot, I鈥檇 argue the true brilliance of this novel lies in Roy鈥檚 prose. Her writing is both lyrical and evocative, almost poetic, a fusion that captures the fragility and quiet despair of the world she constructs. Her imagery is unforgettable: crisp dead insects littering the floor, the wilted arum lilies atop the child鈥檚 coffin, the aroma of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind, the stench of old urine lingering in the air. It鈥檚 a symphony of senses, combining both beauty and decay, woven together with such precision that each line feels like an incantation.
In Roy鈥檚 hands, small moments become monumental. The sound of innocent laugh basking in sunlight, and then, almost imperceptibly, bitter lies ignite like kindling, swelling into devastating fires. A weak protest, dismissed at first, is shattered beyond repair. The narrative reverberates with gut-wrenching sobs, hollow laughter, deafening curses, and late apologies drenched in vertiginous guilt. It is a cacophony of regret that buzzes, swelling with a delirious intensity.
Slapping. Cursing. Spitting. Kicking. Stomping.
Each revelation carves deeper, unraveling the delicate threads of hope. What begins with an air of innocence and optimism spirals into a chasm鈥攙ast, dark, and unrelenting鈥攗ntil every flicker of light is consumed. The tension tightens gradually, each moment more harrowing than the last.
The characters are just as intricately crafted鈥攙ivid, multi-dimensional, and tethered to the weight of societal and familial expectations. Forbidden love, caste oppression, and dysfunctional familial bonds pulse through the narrative, adding complexity without sacrificing the nuanced portrayal of human emotion and interaction.
I almost put this book down at the (child) sexual assault scene, but since Rosh recommended it to me, I mustered the grit and determination to keep going. I鈥檓 glad I did because this is a must-read for anyone who appreciates literary fiction that is as beautifully written as it is socially relevant. While its fragmented structure and constant shifts in time can be disorienting, and the prose, at times, quite dense, the novel remains an essential read.
Rather than diving into the plot, I鈥檇 argue the true brilliance of this novel lies in Roy鈥檚 prose. Her writing is both lyrical and evocative, almost poetic, a fusion that captures the fragility and quiet despair of the world she constructs. Her imagery is unforgettable: crisp dead insects littering the floor, the wilted arum lilies atop the child鈥檚 coffin, the aroma of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind, the stench of old urine lingering in the air. It鈥檚 a symphony of senses, combining both beauty and decay, woven together with such precision that each line feels like an incantation.
In Roy鈥檚 hands, small moments become monumental. The sound of innocent laugh basking in sunlight, and then, almost imperceptibly, bitter lies ignite like kindling, swelling into devastating fires. A weak protest, dismissed at first, is shattered beyond repair. The narrative reverberates with gut-wrenching sobs, hollow laughter, deafening curses, and late apologies drenched in vertiginous guilt. It is a cacophony of regret that buzzes, swelling with a delirious intensity.
Slapping. Cursing. Spitting. Kicking. Stomping.
Each revelation carves deeper, unraveling the delicate threads of hope. What begins with an air of innocence and optimism spirals into a chasm鈥攙ast, dark, and unrelenting鈥攗ntil every flicker of light is consumed. The tension tightens gradually, each moment more harrowing than the last.
The characters are just as intricately crafted鈥攙ivid, multi-dimensional, and tethered to the weight of societal and familial expectations. Forbidden love, caste oppression, and dysfunctional familial bonds pulse through the narrative, adding complexity without sacrificing the nuanced portrayal of human emotion and interaction.
I almost put this book down at the (child) sexual assault scene, but since Rosh recommended it to me, I mustered the grit and determination to keep going. I鈥檓 glad I did because this is a must-read for anyone who appreciates literary fiction that is as beautifully written as it is socially relevant. While its fragmented structure and constant shifts in time can be disorienting, and the prose, at times, quite dense, the novel remains an essential read.
March 20, 2024
It is hard for me to find the words to describe Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. This novel took me on an emotional rollercoaster ride which was excruciatingly wonderful yet wondrously traumatic. At various time I felt like this book deserved 5猸愶笍 or alternately 3猸愶笍! In the end I settled on a solid 4猸愶笍!
What I enjoyed most was Roy's relentlessly creative imagination which weaved this intricate, albeit deceptively simple narrative about the vicissitudes of a Christian family from Kerala, in southern India. She brings to life the rich, yet harsh complexity of Indian society, which is rooted in the age-old caste system in which some groups are deemed 'untouchable,' while at the same time struggling to embrace modernity and radical new ideas like communism. Roy succeeds in delivering an insightful social commentary (or arguably an indictment) of India by refusing to shy away from unflattering issues like poverty, classism and colorism that plague India to the present day. However, at the same time she vividly captures the beauty of ancient Indian culture which still infuses everyday life in the country.
The least enjoyable part of The God of Small Things, for me was the somewhat meandering middle part of the story. It felt at times like I was wading through the story and it was getting deeper and deeper without going towards any particular destination (at least not in a great hurry). In addition, I would warn potential readers of this book about a trigger for pedophilia. There was a bizarre cringeworthy encounter with an 'uncle' that nearly made me lose the thread of the narrative. Although, I must confess it probably is an 'honest' depiction of what happens occasionally in India even to this day, it was nevertheless very unsettling.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone, especially if you are open to being challenged and pushed a bit outside of your comfort zone. You will be rewarded for your perseverance. I found the ending of The God of Small Things absolutely mesmerizing and worth the wait!
What I enjoyed most was Roy's relentlessly creative imagination which weaved this intricate, albeit deceptively simple narrative about the vicissitudes of a Christian family from Kerala, in southern India. She brings to life the rich, yet harsh complexity of Indian society, which is rooted in the age-old caste system in which some groups are deemed 'untouchable,' while at the same time struggling to embrace modernity and radical new ideas like communism. Roy succeeds in delivering an insightful social commentary (or arguably an indictment) of India by refusing to shy away from unflattering issues like poverty, classism and colorism that plague India to the present day. However, at the same time she vividly captures the beauty of ancient Indian culture which still infuses everyday life in the country.
The least enjoyable part of The God of Small Things, for me was the somewhat meandering middle part of the story. It felt at times like I was wading through the story and it was getting deeper and deeper without going towards any particular destination (at least not in a great hurry). In addition, I would warn potential readers of this book about a trigger for pedophilia. There was a bizarre cringeworthy encounter with an 'uncle' that nearly made me lose the thread of the narrative. Although, I must confess it probably is an 'honest' depiction of what happens occasionally in India even to this day, it was nevertheless very unsettling.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone, especially if you are open to being challenged and pushed a bit outside of your comfort zone. You will be rewarded for your perseverance. I found the ending of The God of Small Things absolutely mesmerizing and worth the wait!
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