The God of Small Things
The God of Small ThingsLush, poetic and terrifying, Arundhati Roy’s impressive first novel evokes the mystery and contradictions of the Indian sub-continent through the heart-rending story of “two-egg twins,” Rahel and Estha.
When Rahel returns to the family home in Ayemenem as a grown woman, she remembers Sophie Mol’s funeral and the day years ago that changed everything. Starting at the end, the tale is told, the drama unfolding in pieces, turning in on itself, unraveling, zigzagging skillfully between past and present, in language filled with word play and exquisite metaphors.
Fleeing a disastrous love marriage, the twins’ mother, Ammu, brought them to live with her high caste Anglophile family in Kerala, a state in southern India rife, in 1969, with conflict between the old social order and Marxist rebellion. Welcomed half-heartedly, the twins have no hope of competing with their half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, the daughter their Uncle Chako has never seen, whose arrival has everyone faint with anticipation.
The family is dissipating and set to implode. There’s Chako, the lascivious, Oxford-educated uncle, who is bankrupting the family’s pickle factory; bitter grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, with her unrequited love for a Catholic priest; Mammachi, the matriarch whose head bears scars from her husband’s ritualistic beatings; and Ammu, whose disregard for the Rules of Love set the tragedy in motion.
Sometimes confusing, occasionally overdone, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS is nevertheless a masterful debut. Roy has captured a place, a time, and the emotional landscape of childhood with chilling clarity.