The novel opens with memories of a family grieving around a drowned child’s coffin. An unusual way for a novel to start. There are plenty of horrors to come, that compete for the readers sympathy.
The story traces the ambitious fall of an Indian family, beginning at its chronological end in a landscape of extravagant ruin.
Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. Those hours, like the salvaged remains, must be resurrected, examined. Preserved. Accounted for.
Throughout the book, the author moves between the past and the present, continually angling into that night of Sophie’s death. Well in time for history’s blind date.
What sustains us through this dance between the calamitous past and the bleak present is the acrobatic writing nature. Arundhati Roy refuses to allow the reader to view the proceedings from a single vantage point. The shifting narrative is nourishing, crammed with jokes, metaphors, nonsense rhymes and unexpected elaborations. Though the family withers, it’s story flourishes.
The end of this novel describes a brief interlude of intense happiness.
A paradoxical feeling. Of Wonderment.
As if we’d stumbled upon something sparkling in a wreckage.
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of life it purloined.