Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Arundhati Roy

Genre:  Fiction, Foreign

340 pages, published 1997

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The God of Small Things takes place in Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, in 1969.  It tells the story of an Indian family, young mother Ammu, her twins Rahel and Esthappen, the blind grandmother, Mammachi, Oxford educated uncle Chacko, and Baby Kochamma (grandaunt and ex-nun.  When the twins’ English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive for a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day.

Quotes 

“D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

 

 “…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.  That is their mystery and their magic.”

 “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.”

 

“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”

 

“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

 

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”

 

 “The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”

 

 “Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

 

“He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”

 

 “If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.”

 

“Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”

 

 “Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

 

 “Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”

 “Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.”

 

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

My Take

While Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is an acclaimed book, winning the 1997 Booker Prize, I had a hard time fully immersing myself in the story.  There were parts I liked and some beautiful language, but it left me a bit cold.