I’ve waited long enough to read The God of Small Things. I don’t know why I haven’t read it over the years, but I’m glad I did now. There would be a lot I wouldn’t understand if I had read it before, but now I understood everything precisely as it should be. I know that this book is challenging and it definitely is not for everybody.
First of all, The God of Small Things hurts and breaks the reader to pieces. I already know that I am an empathetic person. But I think most people will be very impressed with this book. In this book, there is an India “freed” from England’s strings, the turmoil in the country, the caste system that amazes you and an impossible love story from the very beginning. Arundhati Roy’s unique language may be a little challenging to get used to at first. Give it time; you get used to it amidst all the sorrow. Before you buy it anyway, I would say take a look at a few pages. Enjoy!
The God of Small Things
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a sky blue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is strand on the highway amid a Marxist workers’ demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . .
Arm only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family–their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist’s moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).
When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river “grey-green.” With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.
Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best know for her novel The God of Small Things. Which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involve in human rights and environmental causes.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
