The God of Small Things: A Novel
by Arundhati Roy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Arundhati RoyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-16
ISBN: 0812979656
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of The God of Small Things: A Novel
Book Review: Unsatisfying Prize-Winner
Summary: 2 Stars
Part of my reason for reading this book was because I was heading to India, and part of the reason was because it was the 1997 winner of the Booker Prize. I had never read a Booker Prize winner before, and while I know that winning literary awards does not guarantee a meaningful, profound, or enjoyable reading experience for everyone, I figured I had to give it a shot. My impression? Mixed. Roy's novel concerns three generations of a semi-prosperous Kerala family living in Ayemenem. Though the chronology shifts frequently as the story moves back and forth tracing events in one or another character's life, everything pivots around traumatic events that occurred when the fraternal twins Rahel and Estha were seven years old and their half-English cousin Sophie came to visit. We learn very early in the novel that Sophie died during this visit, but it is only as the novel develops, and particularly at the end, that we learn how she died, and the ramifications of that death for people inside and outside the family for years to come. The story, though grim and at times graphic, has a certain power in its depiction of the way in which one or two events can become linked with explosive results. Roy was apparently criticized by some in India for her subject matter (which includes inter-caste love), and by some in the UK and elsewhere for writing a book not worthy of the prize--though the latter criticism sounds like literary snobbery more than anything else. At its best, Roy's writing is moving and evocative of emotions and locations. But it was the writing more than the story that left me deeply dissatisfied. These judgments are completely subjective, of course, and one person's silliness is another person's "inventiveness." For me, Roy often seems more taken with the cleverness of her writing than with the story itself, and when she discovers a new turn of phrase she tends to use it to the point of annoyance. Some of her word play left me baffled--not because I didn't understand it, but because I didn't understand why she was so taken with it. Whatever happened to the value of clarity over cleverness? And by clarity I do not mean simplicity. Not at all. But there are authors who manage to write emotionally and thematically complex novels with detailed plots, but with a style that doesn't call attention to itself. So while Roy got many literary points with certain people for her word play, I won't be rushing to buy another of her books even though I found the story in this one interesting and some of the writing was compelling. Maybe I'm being a bit rough on the book by giving it only two stars, but my expectations were much higher. If this is the best novel written that year in the entire Commonwealth (plus Ireland), perhaps it wasn't such a good year for literature.
Summary of The God of Small Things: A Novel
Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy?s debut novel is a modern classic that has been read and loved worldwide. Equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevokably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing ?big things [that] lurk unsaid? in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language.
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