The God of Small Things

A marvelous and disturbing book about a family in rural India, headed by difficult women, and deeply affected by contact with the non-Indian world. The story focuses on twins born to a woman who returns home after divorcing her husband, how they bond with each other, how they interpret the world and its accidents. It also focuses on the caste system which was supposedly abolished but still controls the social structures of this society. And it is about the Love Laws, "The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how".

The writing is lyrical, fascinating. Roy often writes of how the twins as children make up their own language and interpretation, even talking backwards. Speaking of the precipitating events of the past, she writes "It show more 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. For everyone to see."

The story unfolds in the past and present, and the timeline is sometimes not distinct. But that's the way memory works, and it serve this book well. show less

This novel is masterful. Roy's prose is poetry, or near as. With coinages, imagery, and heartbreaking emotion, she transports you to rural Kerala and places you among the cast of the novel across the generations they span. I've just put the book down, and am attempting to extinguish the lingering feeling of oppressive, impending doom that has sat with me throughout the book. More incredibly to me, I enjoyed it, as someone who tends to avoid doom and its impending arrival at as many opportunities as possible. Roy boldly tells you what is going to happen in the very first pages, and unfolds the path to get there beautifully, keeping you entranced not by suspense but with the weight of inevitability. I didn't think it would work until I show more read it.

Inevitability is not just the feeling of the book, it's also a theme. There is history, and there is History. We might take the former as a set of facts, and the latter as facts personified, empowered to affect the ways in which we live. The titular God of Small Things is a the personal tragedies that fall victim to History, when the things we want and need are unreachable because of History's designs and strictures. How free are we, when we live amidst ideology, tradition, family, society? Are we free to live, to love? I won't say this novel gives me hope that we are. I don't even think it makes it clear that we will be; this is a tragedy and History can be ruthless with those that rebel against it. What it does do, is remind me that we should be, because the cost of living constrained thus is far too high a price to pay. show less

I want to add a new category to my reading list: A Book You're Glad You Read Even Though It Depresses You. Thoroughly. At first difficult to follow (I started a family tree in the first chapter; it took multiple chapters and a couple circle-backs to get it correct), The God of Small Things is a straight-forward story told in a crooked line. A circular line, actually, as the narrative doubles back upon itself repeatedly, each time providing additional details about the tragedy we know from the start is coming. While some of the references are lost on readers unfamiliar with the history and culture of India (count me among those with no knowledge that India has a Communist past), the basic story has a very To Kill a Mockingbird vibe to it show more - forbidden love(s), characters that both repel you and elicit your sympathy, and childhood innocence tarnished by the adult world.

There's a wealth of metaphors and literary references at work in the story, some I didn't quite grasp (although I know Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I'm not clear what purpose it serves in this story), some that work in a haunting, mysterious way (Rahel's toy watch, always set at ten to two, combining a sense that nothing can change with a childhood ignorance of the workings of the world). The most effective metaphor is blindness, which serves as a criticism of people's prejudices and their limited understanding of themselves. Vellya in his half-blindness accepts his caste as an Untouchable to his own and his sons' misfortune. Mammachi in her near blindness rages at Velutha for crossing the caste boundary, equally unaware that her tirade is misdirected and that she is manipulated by Baby Kochamma, as evil a character as the system she upholds.

An intriguing book, from the dedication ("For LKC, who, like me, survived") to the last two chapters on the breaking of Love Laws. An effective statement in the tradition of The Jungle and Uncle Tom's Cabin, only with incredibly better prose. show less

This is a wonderful book that is almost spoiled by a terrible beginning. Early on, in an attempt to maintain dramatic tension, or to draw you in, or something, the reader is given very little information about what's actually happening. There's a lot of "after the terrible thing happened" and "at the funeral of the important character whose identity I won't yet reveal". Combine this with an awful lot of jumping back and forth across at least four periods of time and you have a recipe for putting a book down after thirty pages. However, I stuck with this because of its reputation and because of the quality of Roy's humorous, graceful prose. I was very glad I did.

Once all of this writer's workshop nonsense subsides, what remains is the show more story of non-identical twins Rahel and Estha written with warmth and humour in equal measure. As the title implies, Roy addresses grand, universal themes just by describing the (fascinating) everyday details of life and social politics in Kerala. Even when not reading the book, I spent my time pondering the roles of the various characters, the veracity of the narrator's description of them and the implications of events for my own life. Surely that's the mark of a good book. show less

This book has some incredible writing. There are so many sad events in the book and Roy makes you feel part of them completely and describes things with just the right amount of detail to make them real. There are a lot of characters, but it's never hard to keep track and each one is given enough detail to make them real and believable and wish you knew more without ever being frustrated about a lack of information. Parts of it moved me to tears. It's a really powerful novel and I'm absolutely going to look into more of her writing.

So you read that and think "well why not 5 stars". This is going to sound ridiculous, but it's that there were too many sad things. The entire book was sad things. Even the few moments that can be described show more as not sad are more pitiful. Someone has a seemingly happy relationship but really they only think so because they have had no experience and they split up. That sort of thing is the happiest it gets. The non stop barrage of sadness is too much sometimes and I had to put it down often. There is no hope anywhere (although maybe a spark in the ending). This is exacerbated because you find out very early on the basics of the most horrible events that define the story - the rest is sort of just working towards it through flashbacks and filling in the gaps. This means that you KNOW nothing happy is going to happen and the sense of inevitability is hard to deal with. Some decisions characters make just seem pointlessly horrible but you know they have to make them for things to happen as they should. Admittedly, only a few feel unjustified but you just want them to do something nice for once. The child molestation scene was so, so horrible although I feel she wrote it about the best you ever could. The ending is a bit abrupt and although it makes sense it was a bit frustrating.

It seems silly that most of the above was like "book was sad, didn't like" but it casts a long shadow over everything else because it seems EVERYTHING is done to make things worse. It's like a long novel of decay. It just feels a bit ridiculous a few times and occasionally it feels against character and yeah it's a bit pathetic and I fully acknowledge that but it's how I felt.

One thing I'll note that bothered me, although it isn't strictly about the book - the edition I read came with an ending where Roy says something about "acknowledging that everybody is both victim and perpetrator". Putting aside my problems with that statement for now, she uses as an example a certain scene near the end with Rahel and Estha in a police station. In this scene they are 7 and they're manipulated by a policeman and a family member. Yet somehow Roy seems to consider them just as responsible as others (I'd be curious if she considers probably the biggest victim in the book also a perpetrator in some way). To me, this is absolutely bizarre and gross and made me see the scene in a different light and really be not OK with it at all. It comes across suddenly as a nasty attempt to introduce false equivalences - everybody's guilty, even people who cannot possibly understand what's going on without the author literally saying "oh yeah they understood". A disappointing bitter after-taste to a great, if incredibly sad, book. show less

... 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

Take two timelines a couple of decades apart. The earlier line is a few times longer than the later one. Cut each one into beads and string them on threads, every third or fourth bead equipped with a compass pointing to the big, dark whirlpool of a bead near the end of the early string. Cut each string in several pieces. Tangle them up. Try reading that.
I did not enjoy the experience of this book. The story, about a dysfunctional family of no great character and with one dishonestly malevolent member, heads precipitously toward more than one of the tragedies littering the Indian landscape. The language is compelling, as is the imagery. The only aspect I found worthwhile was the portrayal of children making their own sense out of the show more adults' insane behaviors. Oh, and the second timeline is dreck. show less