“As she leaned against the door in the darkness, [Ammu] felt her dream, her Afternoon-mare, move inside her like a rib of water rising from the ocean, gathering into a wave. The cheerful one-armed man with salty skin and a shoulder that ended abruptly like a cliff emerged from the shadows of the jagged beach and walked towards her. Who was he? Who could he have been? The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles. He could do only one thing at a time. If h...

This review is going to be a short one because that’s what happens when almost two months pass after I read the book. I avoided this novel for years although I knew it was a modern classic. I read that it was pretentious and confusing due to its nonlinear structure. I also had the impression it will be very long and similar to The Midnight Children (did not enjoy that one), only written by a woman. Some said that it is the worst Booker Winner. I am happy to report that none of my fears proved to...

"That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less." Honestly, I wanted to like this one SO much but it was terrible. The novel follows a multi-generational Indian family in 1969. The matriarch, Mammachi, is their abused and blind grandmother. Ammu is the weary mother of fraternal twins, Esthappen and Rahel. The twins' favorite uncle, Chacko, brings his white wife over for Christmas, the twins immediately fall in love with their cousin - only to realize just how quickly lif...

Small Perfection. 1969-93, Kerala, India. Rahel and Estha are two estranged early adult siblings, reunited again after decades apart. Rahel, vivacious, outspoken, and working hard abroad; Estha reclusive, near mute, and never far off home. As they fumblingly attempt to reconnect, flashbacks from the past come back and forth, revealing the history and tragedy of a once united family, that now is not. This was one weird f*cked up book, and still one of the best I’ve ever read. The God of Small T...

It is 1969 and India although having achieved independence twenty years earlier is still mired in its caste system. In this light, Arundhati Roy brings us her masterful first novel The G-D of Small Things which won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. A powerful novel filled with luscious prose and a heart rending story, Roy reveals to her readers an India hanging onto to the traditions of the past with a slight glimpse of her future. Ammukutty Kochamma, the daughter of a respected entomologist and cla...

Okay, first things first. The God Of Small Things is a very very clever book, but what makes it exceptional is that it is both beautiful and crafty, a rare combination. This book has structure. Lots of it. She effectively creates a language of her own, a juvenile lucid language which complements the wistful mood of the book beautifully. The plot moves around in space and time with masterful ease and one can't help but experience a vague sense of foreboding, a prickly fear in the back of your nec...

Arundhati Roy - image from SlateThis is a wonderful, image-rich novel told over several generations of a family in India. The central event is the death of a young girl, and how racism, and petty, CYA politics, results in the death of an innocent for a crime that was never committed. The central character is a girl/woman, a twin, with an almost surreal connection to her other. Their family life is told. There is much here on Indian history, the caste system and how that continues to manifest in ...

I'm all by myself here, but what the hell.This reads like a graduate writing class exercise blown from 20 pages to 300. The metaphors, while occasionally fresh and unexpected, are tedious and frequently stand in for something that could be much less complex. The writing is self-conscious and precious. There is really no good reason to tell the story in such a disjointed fashion. Roy's attempts to recreate the way children view the world were cute for about 10 pages, and then became tiresome (the...

Lush, gorgeous prose: reading The God of Small Things is like having your arms and legs tied to a slowly moving, possibly dying horse, and being dragged face-down through the jungle. I mean, like that, only nice. You can't stop seeing and smelling everything, and it's all so foreign and rich. Potentially ripe with e coli. The similes and metaphors Roy employs are simultaneously tactile and surreal, like an overly vivid dream, and her storytelling style is somewhere between Joseph Conrad, Emily D...

This is, without a doubt, the single worst book ever written.It makes virtually no sense, jumping from past to present tense so often and without warning that you have no idea whats going on. Out of nowhere the writer mentions filthy disturbing sexual things for no reason. I could not even find a story in there, just meaningless jibberish. The thing that amazes me most though, is that while i am yet to meet a single person that LIKES this book, it makes it onto all the top 100 lists etc. I can o...