The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | Stunning and Powerful Look in to the Human Heart

The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | Best Booker prize won book

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The God of Small T...

	The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy, 1998 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 869 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Stunning and Powerful Look in to the Human Heart

WOW! I am humbled. I considered myself an ecclectic and well read individual, yet I had not read the genius that is Arundhati Roy! This book tells the heart-breaking story of a well-off family in Kerala, India, and its ultimate downfall. The storyline and the characters are challenging, and I feel compelled to say that the novel is not for those who are faint of heart. Yet, I was mesmerized with how Roy virtually turned the concepts of "novel" and "language" on their head and created a work of art. When I finished I felt a little hopeless, I wanted to cry and laugh, and I wanted to re-write the novel to avoid the inevitable conclusion. I pondered how the world would be without discrimination. More than anything, I wanted to read it again. Amazing.

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Best Booker prize won book

This book won booker prize in 1997, the 50th year of India's independence. A. Roy has a very different approach to write a story. She whispers the story to the readers with those intricate details which we kind of see and don't see with our nakes eyes. A must read. A must read

Beautifully Written

I enjoyed this story for a multitude of reasons. It took me a little time to adjust to the author's writing style, but once I did I felt the story moved fluidly through the past, present, and future. The story is set in India, and exposes a culture of inhuman servitude that is the backdrop for themes of love and death, loneliness and regret, and of shocking disparities that will persist in society as long as differences among people exist. I was confused at first with who the characters were, and how they were related to each other, but this smoothed itself out and vivid, plush characters were revealed. Characters that struggled to manifest their dreams, heal their brokenness, rectify the wrongs in their lives, and appease the world around them. This book is poetically written, and I can see how this wouldn't be appealing to all. But for me, the author's beautiful style transformed everyday disappointments and lifetime atrocities into a witty, humorous, sympathetic, and moving account of lives that seemed so far removed yet so close to home.

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A sad, sad tale

The God of Small Things may well be the saddest love story I've ever read. Arundhati Roy unravels the story almost painfully slowly, then hits you in the end with the sad truth of what she has been trying to say all along. The story is based in India and told from the perspectives of two-egg twins (fraternal twins), Estha and Rahel. It is almost poetic in its telling, sometimes sections even reminding me of the chorus line in a song.

The real core of the story is about how one day changed the entire projectory of the twins' lives. It all begins on the day their cousin, Sophie Mol, comes to Ayemenem, their home town. It's the week of Christmas and Sophie Mol's step-father has just died. Her arrival, and other events that happened in Cochin while the family awaited her arrival, led the twins on an adventure with irreversible consequences. Although, throughout the book the reader knows something terrible is going to happen, nothing prepared me for the ending it had. I don't want to say much more about the plot because I'm afraid I'll spoil it. What I will say is this is a sad, sad tale about human nature, forbidden love, fear and unforeseen consequences.

I recommend reading this book, though this is a book I feel (at least for me) needs to be read more than once in order to gain the full meaning of the words. Personally, I found the language to be confusing. And I found myself getting mixed up about some of the relationships among the characters in the beginning. Instead of trying to figure it out at the time, I decided to just go with it. In the end it all made sense, but a second read will help me clarify some of the things I may have missed.

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