The God of Small Things

This was a book that upon finishing I wanted to start reading it from the beginning all over again. This was a touching, beautifully written book that unfolds in a slow, out of order manner. The first couple chapters were a bit confusing just for this reason, but as the story came into focus, it

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was captivating and enthralling. Roy weaves the story in a way that captures the emotion and the moment without taking away from the power of the story. At times the descriptions were a bit too much for me, but the writing was so beautiful and the story so amazing that it was well worth the read. I highly recommend it!

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I'm glad it's over.

Not that this is a bad book, exactly, but it's not one I could connect to.

First, the good. The language is incredible. This is a book of prose poetry, an extended fiction.

And honestly, that's really all I could like about it. The problem with poetry, at least in books, is that it

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can be distancing. In a few scenes it finally brought the characters' feelings into focus, but mostly it studied them as objects, and pulling back that far makes it difficult to sympathize with, difficult to see as real.

The focus is also odd, in the story-telling sense, mostly because there doesn't seem to be one. What is the point of this novel? Why was it written? Velutha and Ammu took over the end, but both the beginning and up to chapter 13, and then the last few pages were about the twins. It was like being asked to consider too many things at once.

Roy did, at times, really show her world, that is, India circa 1969, fairly well. Sometimes I could see it. But the setting didn't feel integrated, other than the story couldn't take place anywhere else. So why didn't it work?

Intellectually, I can think of many reasons why this story should have worked. But as a novel, it couldn't sell itself to me as a reader, only as an academic. Which I didn't even realize until I started writing this review. Now that I think back, I wish I did like it. I want to have liked it. But I just couldn't connect, like drowning.

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I really wanted to like this one. In fact, when I started the book and it was incredibly slow going, I decided that no matter what, I was sticking with it to the end. At times it felt like I was trying to run on a beach, the faster I tried to read the more exhausting it was. The book is set in

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India and tells the story of a set of twins, one male, one female and their complicated family.
My problem with the book lies mainly with the structure. It jumps back and forth in the timeline with no real warning. First we learn about the twins as adults, then as kids, then about their mother’s life as a young woman, then about her relative’s childhood, etc. It’s hard to follow where you’re at in the tale and whose story is being told if you have to pick it up and put it down a lot.
The names made it more difficult as well, though that’s not the author’s fault. I wasn’t sure whether some of the names, like Aleyooty Ammachi, Velutha and Estha, were masculine or feminine at first. I figured it out quickly, but it was one more element to juggle.
The novel feels incredibly ambitious. It deals with India’s political climate, the caste system, cultural and ethical taboos, molestation, religion, family dynamics, incest, guilt. I feel like it might have been more powerful if the story was a bit more focused on a smaller number of issues.

I will say that my favorite part of the book was the descriptive passages. The author has a beautiful way of phrasing things….

“Margaret Kochmma’s tiny ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gap of warm body entering a chilly sea.”

…but that beauty wasn’t enough to make it work for me. I’d love to hear someone’s opinion on this one that’s familiar with Indian culture. I wonder if some aspects would have worked better for me if I knew the culture better.

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I hated this book. Please don’t read it. I don’t know why everyone loves it. What’s to love? In my English class, we had to read the same book with a partner, and have a discussion about it in front of the class when we were done. I missed the day we picked partners and ended up pairing up

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with my teacher.
I went through the entire book hating it, being bored to death and getting utterly confused (which rarely happens to me). There’s a ton of characters, many of whom are faceless and have no personality and don’t grow at all during the story. Tons of stuff happens, none of it captivating, or understandable.
The big climactic ending is based around something that’s not even brought up until 20 pages before the end. I didn’t care about any of the characters. I wondered why the brother and sister had sex with each other. What did the concession stand guy getting a hand job from the little boy mean? Loss of innocence? I guess? It couldn’t mean anything else. It was never brought up for the rest of the book. And the little boy looses his innocence later, when the “pre-climatic” ending. This book just sucked.
I was sure my teacher was going to enjoy it, since she had said she liked this author’s previous stuff. But I was overjoyed to discover that she and I both hated it. When we had our discussion in front of the class, we both got to vent our ideas why this book was so…bad. She offered the idea that the author was just trying to squeeze in too many topics into one book (sex, racism, death, rape, love, betrayal, family, war, etc…) and I agree with her.
There are soooo many better books out there. Please, read one of them and don’t let this book come near you.

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She asks an impertinent and haunting question: Why are there rules about who to love and how to love them?

This is a book of remarkable contrasts. It contains some of the most moving and beautifully written passages that I have read in quite awhile, but it also tells a heart-breaking story in which not one single character emerges unscathed by the events.

Rahel and Estha are fraternal twins growing up

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in the Kerala state of India. Their world is torn apart at the age of seven when their cousin Sophie Mol, visiting from England after the death of her step-father, dies tragically but quite accidentally. The twins are manipulated into helping implicate Velutha, an “untouchable” who has been having an affair with their mother Ammu, in Sophie Mol’s accident. They observe the police brutally murder Velutha—for violating the rigid caste system more than anything else—and Ammu sent away in disgrace to protect the family’s social standing. Rahel and Estha never really recover from these traumas, as we learn from the sad way in which they reunite 24 years later.

This novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, is justifiably renown throughout the world but not without its flaws. It is over-written in parts and the author’s use of foreshadowing—we know the fates of both Sophie Mol and Ammu shortly after the book begins—can be distracting. Nevertheless, Roy has created a compelling and unforgettable world in which themes such as politics, social structures and discrimination, and the nature of love are woven together brilliantly. She definitely has captured the mood and spirit of a time and place that are foreign to most of us and I enjoyed experiencing that world for a little while.

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I liked this Booker prize winning novel a lot. On finishing I immediately put Roy in my favorites.

Probably not a lot I can add here that hasn't been said before as I see it already has 110 reviews here. Roy's control of her material is superb--she very carefully teases out her plot almost until the

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end where she climaxes her story with a lot of impact. Anyway it is written with much verve and the conclusion is riveting. I would highly recommend it.

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After years of absence abroad, Rahel returns to the little town she grew up in, in Kerala, south-western India, and tries to reconnect with her twin brother and the rest of the surroundings she’s estranged from. The book starts by hinting at a traumatic death that took place when she was a child,

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and subsequent chapters, shifting between the past and the present, ever so carefully build up the background needed to understand the full background of that death, as well as its implications for everything that happened afterwards.

This was a lovely read, on so many levels: the style was mesmerizing, a delicate effort hinting at the poetic rather than full-blown, straight-up lyricism. The characters were vividly drawn, beautifully characterized and lovingly sent off into their predicaments. The plot, too, was a joy to read, because this is one of those books that are not so much made by the story but by the telling, a wonderfully immersive back and forth where past and future simultaneously lead to the ineluctable insight at the centre.

The god of small things is wonderful, on every level, and Roy made it all seem effortless. Definitely one of the best books I read this year.

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At 321 pages this book took me a whole week to read when it should have only been a night. I could only bring myself to read a chapter at a time it was so tedious to get through.

It takes a brother and sister, twins, and jumps back and forth through their life. Sometimes it veers into a little

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background of the side characters but overall it is about Rahel and her brother Estha. When they are younger the tale is about the visit of their cousin Sophie Mol and her subsequent death. So much of the book is leading up to her death that when it finally happens it is really quite anticlimactic and doesn't even grace a full page of the book.

On the other side, one of the un-touchables frequently mentioned in the book has his beating and death graphically described for some time and the sex scene between him and the twin's mother is almost the whole chapter of the last book. Neither of which alludes to the rest of the story as a whole.

While Roy is lauded for her writing, I found that she used a few brilliant "literary" phrases; over and over and over and over. To the point where I kept feeling like I was reading the same chapter again and again. If I never hear or see the words "Puff" and "Two-egg Twins" again I will be exceedingly happy, as she seemed to use them on almost every page.

As far as the plot of the book I felt that the characters were uninteresting or connect-able. It felt like you kept reading to go nowhere in the story.

Overall I just didn't like the book. I know that many people do but my thought is that just because it is an important social issue, it doesn't make the book worth reading. Those social issues could be better explored through better writing.

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It is a very original book and definitely worth reading, but it has serious faults. It is told from the point of view of two young children (twins). The author is merciless in her criticism of the adults who mis-treat the children. This criticism extends to the Indian middle middle class. It is,

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however, impossible to believe that all or even most members of this class are as hard-hearted as those in the book. The author should have created some balance by introducing a few characters who speak up on behalf of the children. As she has not done so, the novel comes across as an angry statement, but ultimately unsatisfactory as art.

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I found this book a struggle, left me with no greater impression than annoyance at having bought it so compelled to finish it.

On the one hand, this is magnificent. The writing is astonishing – “as though his body had the power to snatch its senses inwards (knotted, egg-shaped), away from the surface of his skin, into some deeper more inaccessible recess” (which I actually remember from a mock GCSE exam I was set at

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some point – I recognised the passage in the book!) and Roy has dreamed up an appropriately startling set of circumstances and characters. I’ve never been to India, but I hope that her description is true to the original, because she manages to capture specific images so clearly and in a manner which foreigners can understand.

But I felt disappointed by this 1997 Booker prize winner – there was no semblance of a plot, just anecdotes and episodes back and forth over a century span. I was annoyed by the characters – not one was “normal”; not one really made sense. Something which also struck me as unnecessarily amateurish was the description of one of the main characters – from the author photo on the inside cover, it was transparently autobiographical, which I found lazy. Some of the plot elements (an episode of child abuse, an episode of incest, alcoholic husbands all over the place) seem clichéd, in that they seem to turn up in every book I read!

I wish I’d enjoyed this more – from the reputation of the book, I feel like I must have missed something – but really I was very surprised by the success of the novel given my poor reaction to it.

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I still can't decide what I think about this book- it is a wonderful story and Arundhati Roy is a very clever writer, but I her style isn't quite to my liking. It's a little too choppy and too many capitalizations. Still, there were sentences and passages that were absolutely gorgeous, and I liked

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how well the grit and indecency mingled so effortlessly with the beauty and poetry. It was an interesting story, but somehow I felt like I never broke its surface.

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I disliked the writing style, and the fact that the book reveals major plot incidents, then fills in details. It would have been an effective device except that it was done constantly, for every story line. I found the repeated descriptions (Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo) annoying, the use of

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undefined foreign terms distracting, and the capitalized phrases In The Middle of Sentences for emphasis overdone. The characters, with the exception of the twins and Velutha, are not sympathetic. Not a good read in my opinion.

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I suspect that this book would be more appreciated on a second reading but I will never know. Roy's work is more a dark lyric than a straightforward story, and it requires a little patience to quit obsessing about how it all "comes out" and focus on the unfolding of the experience. Her ability to

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convey the sights, sounds, smells and texture of India is remarkeable and her use of the language is always intriguing; often brilliant. Her ability to convey a sense of horror, as in the scene when Estha is sexually molested by the "orangedrink lemondrink man" is very compellilng. Perhaps my problem with the book stemmed from the fact that the bleakness seemed unredeemed by a single shaft of light. I put the book aside, after finishing the last page, with a sign of relief and a certainty that I would never read this one again. It was, in many ways, a brilliant work, but I would recommend it only with reservations.

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The winner of the Booker Prize in 1997, this exquisite novel about women's role and lives in India in the 1960's and onward, is part of an ongoing series we are reading at our library showing the roles and stories of women in a variety of cultures. This one blew us all away both from the story

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itself, and from the pure beauty of the language.

The story of a multi-generational family features a grandmother who manages a Pickle factory (actually what we think of as chutney), who is almost completely blind, who plays the violin, and who endures incredible beatings from her husband every night after he retires and has nothing to do. It is only after their son Chacko returns to the area having been divorced from his English wife and threatens his father with dire consequences that the old man stops beating his wife. Mammachi (the grandmother), while she certainly doesn't like being beaten, doesn't seem to feel there is anything out of the ordinary about it, and certainly doesn't feel empowered herself to end the beatings.

Then there is the daughter Ammu, divorced mother of the "two-egg" twins Rahel and Estah, who engages in an illicit affair with an untouchable, a man adored by the children. She has not given the twins a last name because she is considering going back to her maiden name, but feels between her father and her abusive husband, there's not much to choose from and so doesn't want to be associated with either.

There's another auntie who converted to Roman Catholicism so she could be close to a priest for whom she had fallen, even going so far as to enter a convent. When she realized he was not going to leave the priesthood and marry her, she leaves the convent, returns to the family home, and adds to the general mayhem. Religion doesn't seem to play a major role in her life and she is livid when she discovers the good Father has left the RC priesthood, converted to hinduism, and taken a hindu wife.

The story actually opens with a funeral. Sophie "Mol", Chacko's daughter, and her English mother have come for a visit at Christmas time. Sophie Mol drowns, and the story starts with her funeral and progress backwards and forwards from there. The time line is somewhat difficult to follow at first, but the lyricism of the words strung together and made up with perfect precision to describe a thought makes the reader forget any problem with story line. This is a book that belongs in the library of every serious lover of literature. It's one I certainly plan to read again, and again. In fact, I want to push aside all my other scheduled and waiting TBRs and sink into a cozy chair and read this one again. As a cultural exposè it is excellent. As an all you can eat buffet of exquisite language, it's indescribable.

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This is my favorite book. It never ceases to move me, and every time I read it I discover something new.

I would like to start by saying that I thought the writing was beautiful and for that it deserved to win the Man Booker prize. I wasn't sure whether to give it 3 or 4 stars but gave 4 in the end because the prose was so lovely. That said, it is a very sad, tragic tale, written in retrospect, so

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that the storyline is revealed gradually, interspersed with the present, which in its bleakness tells its own story. It is understated and contained prose which I happen to like, but I can imagine that this would not appeal to everyone. For me, this was a book well worth reading.

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Told largely through the eyes of the child Rahel, one of a pair of non-identical twins, this is primarily a portrait of how a single person's malevolent self-interest can poison so much around her; other virulent toxins -- notably the relics of the caste system -- play their part in the novel's

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slowly unfolding tragedy, but it's really the bitter, aging, totally self-serving spinster Baby Kochamma whose venom drives events.

The focus is a spell of a few days when the children Rahel and her brother Estha await the arrival of and then become friends with their half-English cousin Sophie Mol, the latter's tragic death, and the aftermath. Interwoven is the disaster of their mother Ammu's passionate relationship with a local lad, Velutha -- disastrous because Velutha is an Untouchable.

Although the adult Rahel appears somewhat sparingly in the book, as she a couple of decades later revisits her old home, the scene of so much pain, in a way she's a conduit through which we learn the tale. This, at least, is how I read the narrative's extraordinarily fanciful language, riddled with nonce-words and chantlike repetitions: we're being presented with a tale coloured by Rahel's recollections of her childhood self. For the most part that language is gloriously evocative, with occasional sentences I found myself wanting to reread just for the pleasure of the words (there's a sort of Alfred Besterish lust for linguistic games at work here); but all too often, alas, it dives into the irritatingly self-indulgent or twee. A few examples from many:

[:]   It made him smile out loud.
[:]   . . . she listened with her eyes.
[:]   He hurried with his mind. [Roy liked this one so much she used it twice.:]
[:]   Estha put his head in his [own:] lap. [A neat trick if you can do it.:]
[:]   But she said it with her dimples . . .
[:]   His face was neither lifted towards the rain, nor bent away from it.

As you'll have guessed, I ended up having very equivocal feelings about Roy's use of language. Was it really serving the tale, or was it just a pretentious lack of discipline? Such concerns were underscored by the unconscionable amount of time Roy takes over the telling of the earlier parts of her story: the narrative swirls around for long chapters during which there are all kinds of verbal pyrotechnics but little or no progress toward the nub of the tale. Finally, perhaps fifty or seventy pages from the end, a momentum does start to build up, so that eventually I was being carried along by an ever-swifter, ever-stronger current; the novel's climax is indeed traumatic, but I suspect quite a few readers, confronted by countless tiresomenesses in the first four-fifths of the book, won't have got that far.

Oh, and there's a scene in the book's concluding pages that should have (and for all I know may have) been nominated for the relevant year's Bad Sex Award. I have no quibble with the scene being there -- in fact, I'd say that for the novel's sake it's structurally necessary that it be so -- but I do have qualms over its execution.

All in all, then, I'm still very much in two minds about this novel. I do recognize its many strengths, I applaud Roy's courage in playing so roughly with the English language, I laughed in all (or at least most of) the right places, I near-wept over the events of the finale, and I 'd say the book was, because of its linguistic ambition if for no other reason, worthy of the Booker Prize it won; yet all at the same time so much about it was irritating me that I'm not sure it won't be the case that, in memory, it'll be the irritation that wins out.

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I think this was another book that failed to live up to all the hype. It took a lot of effort for me to actually get through it, and I feel like it wasn't worth all that work. I'm not a fan of the writing style and I felt confused by some of the minor characters and basically the point of having

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them in the story. Just not my book I guess.

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Rahel and Esthappen are dizygotic twins, born of two eggs but of one soul. In Kerala, India, the twins' mother Ammu is raising them with the help of the twins' grandmother Mammachi, their great-aunt Baby Kammachi, and their uncle Chako. At the beginning of the story, Chako's young daughter Sophie

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Mol was found dead. From her funeral, the story moves back and forth in time to reveal the circumstances of her death and how someone that the twins loved by day and Ammu loved by night tore the family apart.

At first, The God of Small Things is impossible to absorb. Don't despair. Persist! Push forward until the story grabs you! The author's writing might seem fragmented and annoying at first. Later, when you figure out the action, the writing becomes lyrical. It has a beautiful rhythm and sound to it. This book might not be for everyone, though. My husband never made it past the first page! He kept repeating "It was just the language. I couldn't get through it. I couldn't read it." If you're willing to make it into the second chapter, I think you'll gladly make it through the whole story.

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Mind blowing.
Upon first reading as a study with Sixth Form, I struggled to get past the first 100 pages, however, after beginning the novel again, I was unable to put it down.
The beauty of the novel is that it is so complex, however once the concepts are grasped, it makes a compelling read. Roy's

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style flows wonderfully through the chapters, despite the fact that it isn't written in chronological order.
'The God of Small Things'is definitely worth a read, and I'd recommend it to anybody, without hesitation.

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My biggest criticism of this book is that the author jumps back and forth in time, without always giving the reader a framework in which to understand the "current" time. Most of the book takes place when the twins-from-one-egg Rathel (f) and Estha (m) are seven years old, growing up in Ayemenem,

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India. They live with their mother Ammu, their blind grandmother Mammachi, their uncle Chacko and their truly evil aunt Baby Kochamma.

I found this book depressing on almost every level: the living conditions, the social conditions (the caste system and the rise of Communism, the unbearable sadness of most of the characters' lives, the lack of hope for the future. The language, however, was captivating and powerful - scenes almost living and breathing at times, at other times seeming childlike and singsong.

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Ignore the story. Read it for the poetry and the love between the twins. It's got that loose messy author's first book feeling -- in a good way!