It was ____. In a heart-wrenching/I-didn't-really-realize-it-was-____-until-a-few-hours-after-I-finished-it sort of a way.
I might have liked it in the same way that I liked All The King's Men. It might even be a little like All the King's Men, except in South India. It's kind of about everything. Corruption, Christianity, caste and untouchability, communism, democracy, Hinduism, the desire to ruin other people, good smells, bad smells, factory conditions, sexual harassment, jealousy, violence, disempowered women, police brutality, flowers, authority, the unfairness of adult decisions, the inability of adults to understand the minds of children, innocence taken away....but more than all of these things, it's about love. Fatherly love, love between twins, motherly love, desire, forbidden love, incest, love between cousins, an uncle's love, inappropriate love. It's about breaking the "Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much."
And more than about love, it's about the way it's told. The plot twists are kind of sad and horrifying and ugly and throat-lump-y. But the prose is funny in the way where you laugh and then feel bad about the fact that you laughed out loud and are glad that no one knows what you just read and laughed at. Because the parts you laugh at are the ones told from the children's points of view--the painfully honest and hilariously sarcastic or ironic observations that only children can make and describe out loud because taboos and social norms and adulthood keep you from outwardly observing or talking about or laughing at such awkward or hurtful or vulnerable things. The narrator and the children point out, very clearly, both the ugly things and the beautiful things that end up being the most powerful human motivations, which propel the entire series of events of the story. Arundhati Roy did pretty ____ with this novel.
I still haven't quite absorbed or processed the whole thing. Maybe I'll be able to fill in the ____'s sometime.
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"Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story."
-The God of Small Things
"And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside."
-The God of Small Things
"If you're happy in a dream, does that count?"
-The God of Small Things
2 comments:
Interesting. I remember loving it. For all the small things she brings to light. For all those small things we experience but never stop to think about it. For all the small things that are actually big things.
oh whoa, I really want to read that now
I'm fascinated by love
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