The God of Small Things in On Paths Unknown

Sep 13, 2019 Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it

Shelves: indian-20th-c, fiction, booker-winners, novels

I was grabbed viscerally by this book since yesterday that I finished today which I ended with the word “Tomorrow.” It was beautifully written, but it took me a while to appreciate the supersaturated text as there are analogies and allusions in nearly every sentence. The characters are drawn graphically and realistically. I also liked the Capital Letter words and concepts that are sort of a kids filter on the omniscient narrator’s text. My issue with the book is that all of the characters lack a ...more

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Nov 29, 2018 Diana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 80-books-around-the-world, favorites, booker-prize, twins-in-fiction

The God of Small Things [1997] – ★★★★★

Once in awhile a book comes your way which is so powerful in its message, so inexplicably poetic in its presentation and so wondrous in its understated emotion that you may wonder how come you have not read it yet. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is that book to me. The notable feature of the book is that it is a debut novel which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. It takes a cross-generational approach to tell the story, but at the heart of ...more

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May 11, 2019 Vigneswara Prabhu rated it it was amazing

Ayemenem, a place where no one is happy, and everyone is miserable and prejudiced to various degrees.

Roy’s ode to spit, piss, sweat and filth. Putridness pervades everywhere, in all locations and they seem to pervade into your very minds. Whether it is describing the piss covered dimly lit public toilets in the Abhilash cinemas, with their rusted wash basins and toilets with used cigarette butts turned yellow in several golden showers. Or the universal filth of the phenomenon that are your ave ...more

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Jan 02, 2022 Erich C rated it really liked it

Shelves: my-library

A wonderful way to start a new year of reading! This book is beautifully written and includes important themes, a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

The central question asked by the novel is "who should be loved and how," and Roy addresses it in several ways, including mention of the Love Laws. When I searched for more information online, I learned that the most recent iteration of such policies in India are known as "love jihad" laws, which are meant to prevent Muslim men from marrying Hindu wo ...more

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Feb 22, 2016 Mahya Faraahi rated it did not like it

Wants so very very badly to be an Important novel about Stories and Thoughts and History and Love that it actually goes ahead and capitalises those words, so you get phrases like 'Big Things lurk unsaid' - just so you know those things are indeed Big.
Worse,nearly every profound line is set as its own paragraph. It has the effect of the narrator putting the book down and looking you very sternly in the eye- it comes off as so self-important that it even ruins pefecttly good lines by tugging at yo Wants so very very badly to be an Important novel about Stories and Thoughts and History and Love that it actually goes ahead and capitalises those words, so you get phrases like 'Big Things lurk unsaid' - just so you know those things are indeed Big.
Worse,nearly every profound line is set as its own paragraph. It has the effect of the narrator putting the book down and looking you very sternly in the eye- it comes off as so self-important that it even ruins pefecttly good lines by tugging at your sleeve, going, look, look at this, isn't this profound. Like saying 'it's a joke': if it was a good one you wouldn't have to say it, and if it was a good one you've just ruined it anyway.
And a lot of the lines aren't very good, and formatting them like some kind of grand yet self evident revelation makes them flat out silly. Take this:
“Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age."

Just because you give every two words its own bloody line doesn't mean it makes any sense. Thirty-one IS a young age to die, it's not any more of a 'viable die-able age' than 21. The way every single statement in the narration is put down like a fucking priceless jewel of profoundity becomes unbearable with stuff like this.

Bananas.
Too sweet.
Unpleasantly chalky.
An inedible, indigestible fruit.
(the bananas a metaphor for Life, btw)

The writing utterly chokes the plot, which is not at all bad. There are some really lovely moments of dialogue - like when the children are crushing ants and one of the children says,"Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely”, even if it is probably intended as a metaphor about the inherent cruelty of mankind*, the way Roy shows the children in their horrible weird games is very natural and original, as a lot of the characterisation is. This need for profoundity is just inescapable; if there is a moment of levity in the story it will probably be followed by an aphorism on the Contrast between Light and Dark and Laughter and Oblivion and Evil to explain it for us thickos.

*Why is killing ants used so much as a sort of device to show cruelty, they probably can't feel pain. ...more

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