I enjoyed reading ’The God of Small Things’. The book is written with a lyrical sense of poetry that I’ve found after a long time. It might be autobiographical, but it was easy to relate to the characters from Kerala.
We see them all around us, not just from Kerala, but all over. Her writing style is impressive, although the content is at times depressing. I loved many ’lines’ from the book - I’ve written them down for posterity, warm flowing words that stay with you long after the book has been put away.
Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel’s protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha.
In a narrative that is sometimes full of suspense but sometimes long winded, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins’ behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Local politics, social taboos and the history of the family all come together in a drama of a tragedy after which a family is irreparably shattered.
A quote from the book :
A few months ago, in July, when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Armstrong had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed though she?d never seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Armstrong might conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit? No, sir.