THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
April 14, 2020POST LECTIO : A Deserving Booker-prize Winner
Title : The God of Small Things
Author : Arundhati Roy
Year : 1997
Genre : Literary Fiction
Summary : Set in Communist Kerala, at its core, a very tender romance, this novel deals with the effects of “Small Things” and describes how “Love Laws” can break a person’s life.
The book is worth all the accolades, praises and raving reviews it got and it still gets. The writing is really flawless, it is so beautiful that certain passages can be read a hundred times and you will be enchanted, every single time. The narrative structure is non-linear. It jumps from present to the past and so forth. Even in the present, there is more than one point of narration. It may sound complex but it is not that confusing.
“There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
The portrayal of Caste politics and the then political climate of Kerala have been deftly done by Arundhati Roy. She does not force you to make an opinion or take a stand, but rather she just states the facts and the situations and the consequences makes you react. The characterisations are all to the notch. Nothing is in excess, every single word that is in the book has a value. In this well-acclaimed debut, she has proved to be a writer par excellence.
“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”
The thing with this book is that, you either love it with all your heart or you loathe it from the bottom your heart. There is no in-between. The moment you read the first few pages, it becomes your story. You start to feel the dust from the streets of Kottayam on your skin, you can hear the crows on the mango trees and smell the tangy aroma of the pickles.
“And the air was full of thoughts and things to say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
When you close the last page of the book, you feel a vacuum in your chest and in that vacuum somewhere there is start of something warm and shapeless, that stays with you forever. Maybe that’s what good literature does, and every time you read a piece of good literature, the warm feeling grows a little more.
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