The God of Small Things

Arundahti Roy created a stellar work of literature in one go with this novel, realizing every writer's dream. Reading its opening pages I withheld my praise, knowing these would be the most polished but could she keep it up? She could, and she excelled them. All the hallmarks extolled by modern literature are masterfully incorporated: the slow reveals through deftness with time, the playfulness of language, the wonders of description and astute metaphor, the depth of characters, the slow unravelling of captivating mystery, and the fascinating insights into human nature. The novel takes place in India and has all the foreign-to-me hallmarks of that culture, but it could have happened next door to me for the humanity it captures.

It's a show more rare book these days that doesn't tire me at any point, but the inventiveness just kept drawing me on and on. The novel is half told in a straightforward manner, half imbued with Rahel's imaginings and thought process that places a sort of obscuring overlay across the scenes. Seeing the full picture unveils a kind of red herring that bothers me, but I can also appreciate what purpose it served in demonstrating my own biases and assumptions. If I were a re-reader, this novel would be a prime candidate. show less

Reading this was unlike any reading experience I've ever had.

The story isn't told so much as it is poured into a basin, wholly but slowly, so as not to produce any waves or splashes. And I didn't so much "enjoy reading" as I was compelled to keep diving in and around and through it, even though I knew for sure I was not heading for anything remotely resembling a happy ending at the bottom of the bowl.

Glorious writing. Beautifully complex structure. Tragic, Disturbing, Human-Love Story.

... of a viable die-able age ...

The flow of time is broken,
the storyline is not really a line,
it branches off, jumps across oceans
and generations, it curves back and
like a snake devours its tail.
Pieces fit together perfectly in this
picture-puzzle, linked, interconnected
by an intricate design of threads -
phrases reaching out through time,
penetrating from one page to the next
and finally breaking out of the paperback confines
to stay in the back of this reader's mind
coming to life sporadically long after
the book is read and buried on the shelf.
No, the book is not really a puzzle,
the tragic end is known, predicted,
guessed in the beginning.
With the outcome determined,
the story grows within,
each life governed by the laws
of 'who should love show more who and how much',
the rules eventually broken by love itself,
which knows neither boundaries nor laws. show less

"A few dozen hours can affect the outcomes of whole lifetimes...Little events...suddenly become the bleached bones of a story", 1 April 2017

This review is from: The God of Small Things (Paperback)
Set in Kerala, Southern India, in the 1970s and today, this is a totally original work. 31 year old Rahel is returning to her childhood home - to her aunt 'Baby' Kochamma and the twin brother she has not seen for many years.
From the first page the reader realises this is a work of masterful prose; Roy's descriptions bring the rank and humid village and its river to life.
"Outside the rain had stopped. The grey sky curdled and the clouds resolved themselves into little lumps like substandard mattress stuffing."

There is a childhood tragedy which show more somehow had lasting implications for the whole family, but this is only slowly revealed in all its detail, as the narrative shifts backwards and forwards. There are moments of great humour as we see the world through the eight-year-old twins' eyes; also of heartbreak, as their lives are ruined forever by an accident and by the malice of the adults around them.

Although it's masterly writing, maybe it leaves the reader more impressed than emotionally touched, but still a great novel. show less

The God of Small Things is exquisite. Arundhati Roy doesn’t just tell a story, her descriptions are so evocative that the words seem to pop off the pages and all the tastes, smells, sounds, suns and monsoon rains of India that run through her prose are tangible. This is a very clever book, in a non-pretentious way. The story is told through a non-linear narrative between 1969 and 1993 and spans four generations of a family. Twins Rahel and Estha are the main protagonists, (although the world is seen largely from Rahel’s perspective) We are told about two major events in chapter one that shape the entire story and by gaining this knowledge so early it creates a sense of dread that enormously impacts how this book is read. This is a show more tale of fate and how quickly innocence can be lost, how far reaching the things we say or don’t say can be, the impact of who we love or don’t love and how much or how little has on those around us, who we blame for our grief, who suffers the consequences of the actions of others and how the blameless end up becoming the blamed. I love this book, it’s beautiful, sad, witty and soulful. What it isn’t is a light read, it’s traumatic, graphic and so haunting that it will stay with you long after you have finished reading the final words of the last sentence. show less

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.” – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Beautifully written tragedy about the long-term impact of childhood trauma and an indictment of classism in India. Set initially in 1969 (and looking back twenty-three years later) in the village of Ayemenem, show more state of Kerala, the family story revolves around the lives of fraternal twins, a boy, Estha, and a girl, Rehal. They live with their divorced mother, Ammu, Grandaunt Baby Kochamma, Uncle Chacko, and grandparents, Mammachi and Pappachi. Their family runs a pickle factory. Cousin Sophie Mol and her mother arrive from England for a visit, and their lives change forever. The classism story centers around Velutha, a carpenter and pickle factory worker, whose family is descended from Paravan, a caste formerly labeled as “untouchable.” Though officially the caste system has been abolished, the unwritten “love laws” of society are still practiced, and relationships between those of different castes are considered taboo. Dire consequences are meted out for crossing social boundaries.

Roy tackles some heavy themes, including marginalization, domestic violence, sexism, child molestation, gender bias, patriarchy, and oppression of the weak. The story moves fluidly backward and forward through time, providing insight into what has happened and foreshadowing events to come. Foreboding is present from the beginning. Something traumatic has happened, and the reader is aware that more sorrow and pain lies ahead. The reader knows what will happen but does not know how. The poetic writing evokes vivid scenes, images from a child’s point of view, emphasizing the small details children tend to notice. The adult perspectives are covered through a third person omniscient narration, providing the backstory, motivations, and complexities of the characters. The author experiments with language using inventive phrasing, and imbues poetic rhythm into the writing, bringing the story to life. The language, tone, and style shift appropriately and effectively to convey an adult’s mature viewpoints versus a child’s more naïve impressions. The narrative moves seamlessly between lush descriptions of an idyllic landscape to the ugliness of social stigma.

I found it a deeply touching story of love, fear, cruelty, guilt, mortality, loss of innocence, and rebellion. This book is a prime example of well-crafted social commentary, which makes a point while focusing on the story at hand. It is also a multi-generational family saga depicting India’s cultural complexities, political climate of the time, and assortment of religions. Hope for the future is shown by the decreasing influence of traditions and societal mores on each subsequent generation. It will appeal to readers of literary tragedies, or those who appreciate evocative prose with a fluidly flowing non-sequential timeline. This book won the Booker Prize in 1997. show less

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 show more 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, Ammu is sent away, Estha is sent to his father, and Rahel is left behind to be raised by her uncle and grandparents, who "provided the care (food, clothes, fees) but withdrew the concern".

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: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/290519826 show less