The God of Small Things
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Multiple editions, click to view covers:
Recommended By
Rebecca Adler, Avid, Alisson, celeste, Deepti, Klassy Pessumal, punkaroo, and La Diosa Biblioteca de Kentucky.
Planning on Reading
Ten Taxis, Vrushali, MUtopia, yejjie8, Plebean, and hartzsa.
Book Details
Written by Arundhati Roy.
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($14.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen 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 and her mother arrive on a Christmas visit, the twins learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.
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Rebecca Adler thinks this book is Good.
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 told from the perspectives of two-egg twins (fraternal twins), Estha and Rahel and 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.
I do recommend reading it, 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 myself getting confused in some of the wordings and with 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.