‘Dazzling….
as subtle as it is powerful’
Introduction
Book’s Name - God Of Small Things
Author’s Name - Arundhati Roy
Genre - Psychological, domestic fiction
Language - English
Synopsis - Spoiler Alert
Ammu Ipe is desperate in order to escape her ill-tempered father, Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, Mammachi. She persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with her distant aunt in Calcutta.
To avoid returning to Ayemenem again, she marries a man over there. But later after sometime discovers that he is an habitual alcoholic, and he also physically abused her and tries to ponce her to his boss.
She gives birth to her two beautiful children, Rahel and Estha. After that she leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Eventually, Chacko has also returned to India from England after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and following the subsequent death of Pappachi.
The multi-generational family home in Ayemenem also included Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. During young age, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, who is a young Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma got converted to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent against her father's wishes.
But only after a few months in the convent, she realizes that her vows brought her no closer to the man she has loved in the first place. Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to America.
Because of her ungrateful love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply alienated over time. Throughout the whole book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly manipulates upcoming events to bring disaster.
About the Author
Suzanna Arundhati Roy, born on 24 November 1961, is an Indian author who is best known for her novel The God of Small Things published in 1997, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, and completed it taking 4 long years in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part of the story line captures her childhood experiences in Ayemenem.
About the Book
The God of Small Things is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy. The story is about the childhood experiences of the fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how, and how much."
The book explores how much the small things actually affect people's behavior and their lives altogether. The book also reflected its irony against casteism, which is surely a major discrimination that still prevails in India.
The God of Small Things was Roy's first and only novel until the publication of ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ twenty years later in 2017. She began writing the manuscript for The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished four years later, in 1996. It was published the following year.
The publication of the book propelled Roy to international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of The New York Times Notable Books of the year. It reached fourth position on the latter as the Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction.
From the very beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance. It was published in May, and the book was sold in around 18 countries by the end of the month of June.
Psychological Analysis
‘Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story’ (Roy 17),observed by Arundhati Roy herself in her novel- The God of Small Things. The book is one of the miracles of creation in modern literature.
With her one single novel, she was capable of shaking the literary world. She has raised a strong voice of defense in favor of the mute and the suppressed, the discarded and the subjugated. She wedged a powerful protest against the gender and social discrimination which with its downtrodden, turn people into a discarded and tyrannized mob.
There is also a bold portrayal of sex and sexuality, which is a far cry from those days when even in progressive West, women were not allowed to behold a pen, let alone writing such sort of things.
Famous Quotes
‘And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.’
‘If you're happy in a dream, does that count?’
‘Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.’
‘The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.’
‘He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.’
The Bottom Line
The novel The God of Small Things is a tragic tale of decay and disintegration of a society portrayed through its story. The way the book is written is very unconventional as compared to any Indian writer. Roy definitely belongs to the new generation of authors who tussle with urgent social issues along with the hidden psychic forces in a very bold narrative way.
The book is all about the problems related to discrimination, and it is indeed very well set up in such a plot that the readers could connect not only with the book, but can also address the problems prevailing in our society.
Personally I would recommend this book to the younger generation and youth of our society who will be the future of the society, and could manage to lit up a fire of peace protest by at least changing a single person from this discriminated set of thoughts in their lives.
My Ratings for the book - 5 on 5
You can also buy a copy of this outstanding piece of writing from Amazon - The God of Small Things
Written By - Pavas Shrigyan
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