God of Small Things » (Reprint)

Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She has worked as a production designer and written the screenplays for two films. She lives in New Delhi. This is her first book.

"Dazzling...remarkable. A novel that turns out to be as subtle as it is powerful." --The New York Times

"This outstanding novel is a banquet for all the senses we bring to reading." --Newsweek

Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997, The God Of Small Things was a stunning debut for Arundhati Roy. Roy's craftsmanship, highly original style, and intricate structure struck a chord with reviewers and readers alike. An international bestseller, this exquisite novel will surely be remembered -- and reread -- in years to come. It is a work that "makes you catch your breath, that changes the way you view life and its hidden complexities." (Earth Times)

Set in Kerala, India, in 1969, The God Of Small Things is the story of seven-year-old twins Rahel and Estha, born of a wealthy family and literally joined at the soul. Rahel and Estha are cared for by a host of compelling characters: their beautiful mother, Ammu, who has left a violent husband; their Marxist uncle, Chacko, still pining for his English wife and daughter who left him; their prickly grandaunt, Baby Kochamma, pickling in her virginity; and the volatile Veluth, a member of the Untouchable caste. When Chacko's ex-wife, Margaret, and lovely daughter, Sophie, unexpectedly return, the household is thrown into disarray. Tragedy strikes in the form of an accident (that may not have been accidental) and a terrifying murder.

Tremendously powerful and lushly romantic, The God Of Small Things effectively shifts between two time periods: Rahel's present-day trip home to see her mute, haunted twin brother, and a December day 20 years before -- the tumultuous day that tears the family apart. With mesmerizing language that brings to mind such authors as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner, The God Of Small Things ambitiously tackles such profound issues as family, race, and class, the dictates of history, and the laws of love. Rahel and Estha learn too soon that love and life can be lost in a millisecond.

To the Western reader, The God Of Small Things is both exotic and familiar, written in a sensual language that's entirely fresh and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of myth and culture.

Jennifer Howard

Arundhati Roy's rich, humid fairy tale of a novel begins in June, when the monsoon rains send the province of Kerala, in southwestern India, into fecund frenzy: "The countryside turns an immodest green ... Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads." Behind this lush life, however, something festers. Rahel Kochamma, one of the novel's twin protagonists, returns to her family home in the Kerali town of Ayemenem, and decay slithers out to greet her. The house walls "bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against glistening stone."

This slithering overripeness hints at what's really rotten in Ayemenem: the past, specifically a chain of events set in motion on "a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent)," when the twins' half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, came to visit. Two weeks later Sophie was dead, drowned in Ayemenem's river, leaving behind a shattered family and a terrible secret. The narrative eddies along toward the secret of Sophie's death, but ultimately it flows into the drowning depths of history. The God of Small Things is a story of forbidden, cross-caste love and what a community will do to protect the old ways. The Kochamma family business, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, is emblematic of the theme. Ayemenem is practically pickled in history. Roy, an architect and screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, capably shoulders the burdens of caste and tradition, a double weight that crushes some of her characters and warps others, but leaves none untouched.

Roy takes up classic material, but she delights in verbal innovation and stylistic tricks. She runs words together -- "thunderdarkness," "echoing stationsounds" -- and plucks nouns from verbs and verbs from thin air. And she has hit on a striking way of getting at a child's point of view (told in third person, the story unfolds more or less as young Rahel and Estha experience it). When her mother tells a rambunctious Rahel to "Stoppit," Rahel "stoppited." At Sophie's funeral, a bat alights on a mourner: "the singing stopped for a 'Whatisit?' 'Whathappened?' and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping."

At times it feels as though you've dropped into a faux Rushdie novel, with cartwheeling corpses and talking statues. Mostly, though, Roy's verbal exuberance is all her own, and it makes The God of Small Things a real pleasure. History's lessons may be bitter, but Roy serves them up fresh, pungent and delicious. -- Salon