Most of the readers dismiss this book as serious hogwash. Admit it. You can either love this book or hate it. We love to hate this book.
Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize winning Novel the God of Small things is often accused of being grand iloquent, pretentious and even anti-communist where its none of these things. The Novel, set in Ayemenem, Kerala explores casteism, hypocricy, love, loss and anguish through the intertwined lives of its rich characters, most notably the twins, Estha and Rahel.
Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
The other characters are Ammu, their mother who commits the unpardonable sin of carrying on a liason with Velutha, an untouchable, whom Roy also refers to as ‘The God of loss’, Ammu’s scholarly Brother Chacko and his ex-wife Margaret, their daughter Sophie Mol, and Ammu’s mother, the repressed reprobate Baby Kochamma.
The plot is as intricate and multi-colored as stained glass and keeps shuffling back and forth between time brilliantly capturing the way the mind functions. The death of Sophie mol, the twin’s English cousin who makes a visit to Ayemenem with her Mother, Margaret Kochamma, ostracizes Estha, Rahel and their Mother from the Syrian catholic community and that is one of the things that gives to the story a sense of despondency and complete surrender to their tragic lives.
Roy’s language is poetic and witty ‘not young, not old, a via-ble die-able age’, and her treatment of the sorrows plaguing the lives of her characters is brutally incisive; There is no room for loose sentiment or langorous philosophising. Yet, there is an undercurrent of deep empathy and kindness and the plot is anything but dry. All this said, The God of small things is no doubt a difficult Novel and demands the complete attention of the reader. It doesn’t present life to you on a delicate platter but scalds you with its intensity. Sadly, the novel is as misunderstood as it is understated and although its been five years since I read it, there has been a dearth of readers with whom I could appreciate it.
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Posted by Tismar Khan on October 15, 2006 at 7:10 pm
and what exactly was accused of being “anti-communist”
btw, i never realized these days people are even accused of being anti-communist. I thought they are just accused of being communist.
Posted by ruhi on October 15, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Kerala is a communist state in India, and people in Kerala have talked about the book being anti-communist-specifically referring to the part where Velutha takes part in a Marxist procession.
People can be accused of anything and everything. Its the matter of being opposed by someone who has different views.
Posted by Tismar Khan on October 15, 2006 at 8:19 pm
i didnt read the book . so i dont know the details. i was just curious what was in the book that made it anti-communist.
Posted by ruhi on October 15, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Hmm..in that case, if you enjoy reading fiction, you should try to read this book!
Posted by Jay on October 27, 2006 at 1:21 am
Oh .. well ummm… TGST .. is too shallow a take on anti communism… to call it so would be ……doing a BJP out of a vande matram.
I mean the story was just woven around the situations. It was about the opportunists rather than communism.
Its been long since i read the book. However, one character i remember is “Muralidharan”…typically coz of the physical depiction and blank humour thrown upon us through it.
Posted by Unaccustomed Earth « Time and Again on March 31, 2008 at 4:18 pm
[...] and Noble and get a copy tomorrow.Now…only if Arundhati Roy would write another book. I haven’t yet gotten over The God of Small Things, even though I read it more than a decade back, during the time it was released. By the way, what [...]