The God of Small Things, Part II: (Chapter V. God's Own Country - XI. The God of Small Things)

[Jay]

Please discuss the second part of The God of Small Things in this folder , putting spoiler alerts in, when necessary.

[Irene]

I don't want to put this book down. The writing is outstanding; the similees are so creative and evocative.

I am coming to care about these flawed characters, especially Ammu, Velutha and the twins. Despite the fact that Chacko intimidated his father and managed to stop the domestic violence, I do not trust that he does not carry the seed of his father inside of him. The sense of impending tragedy is becoming more defined.

Maybe I will be proven wrong, but I suspect that much of what shatters these characters will be universal. I am suspecting that the traditional culture will make the lines of the story show with greater starkness, but that its universal appeal is that the forces exist everywhere.

[Jay]

I was having a difficult time keeping the family members straight in my head, but when the author went into more detail about their back-stories, it really helped and I found, like you Irene, I couldn't put it down! What's going to happen next to Sophie...

[Cat]

Jay, I wrote out a character cheat sheet, which helped! But like you said, I don't need it anymore.
I'm enjoying this book, but really only because I looked up what happens to Sophie on Wikipedia. The foreshadowing is totally overdone in my opinion. It feels manipulative, and like she doesn't trust the reader to keep going unless they keep getting baited with: "Keep reading, the big reveal is coming..." Here is a quote from the book that I completely agree with, but is ironic because it doesn't describe Roy's novel at all.

"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." (p. 218)

I wish that Roy had just described every single little detail of Sophie's death on page one, and then trusted us to want to keep reading. Then I think I could call it a Great Story.

[Irene]

I never had a sense of foreshadowing concerning Sophie's death. It was clear from the beginning that she died and I never felt as if the details were going to be all that important. One more little girl died in a country where children die all the time. Maybe that is why I was not disappointed or surprised by the brief description of her death when it does finally come. For me, the question was why did one more child's death have such an expansive ripple across the decades. This never felt like a story about Sophie's death to me, but a story about forbidden love and the consequencs of defying such strictures. In a way, I found the final sceen so unsettling because if violating the prohibitions against love between classes, for a priest, of little boys can cause such breakage in families, what will result now that another taboo has been violated? All the "foreshadowing" of Sophie's death felt like the Wizard of Oz warning us not to look behind the curtain.

[Jay]

Cat wrote: "Jay, I wrote out a character cheat sheet, which helped! But like you said, I don't need it anymore.
I'm enjoying this book, but really only because I looked up what happens to Sophie on Wikipedia...."

Cat, I should've written a char sheet too... Ha, love the quote you found and I wish she would've used her own advice. With her style of foreshadowing, she made me feel like this death WAS going to be the hub to the rest of the spokes she wrote about, but it may not be the case.