Book review: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
I have been hearing praise lavished on this novel since it was first published in the 1990s but somehow The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy still exceeded my expectations. It goes to some tough, dark places but manages to use a playfulness with language to prevent it from being a tough, dark read.
That same playfulness with language also means that the story initially feels elusive, at a distance, even though most of the facts are given to the reader up front. We start with a 31-year-old woman, Rahel, arriving at her childhood home in Kerala after a long absence. She has come because her twin brother Esthappen has also come back. The only other family member living there now is their aunt Baby Kochamma.
We learn early on that something terrible happened when the twins were 7 and that they haven’t seen each other since. Some of the major details are revealed in the first few pages, while other details are saved to almost the final page. It involved their English cousin Sophie, their mother Ammu, the local Communist leader Comrade Pillai and a local man called Velutha who worked in the family’s pickle factory.
Switching between 1969 and 1993, Roy gradually reveals the facts but she also builds the characters piece by piece. When new details are revealed about a character, that becomes another way to refer to them. For instance, 7-year-old Rahel wears her hair “on top of her head like a fountain” in a “Love-in-Tokyo” hair band, and from then on is sometimes simply referred to as “the fountain” or “Love-in-Tokyo”. This is occasionally confusing but for the most part works well to give something like a child’s point of view to the 1969 sections.
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