The God of Small Things

At heart Roy's book is about true love thwarted by family and society. Set in the state of Kerala on the rain-soaked coast of the Indian peninsula, Ammu, an independent woman from a good family, and Velutha, an enterprising man belonging to the "untouchable" caste have a short, intense love affair that ends in tragedy. India's ancient caste system (the god of big things, the law of who may love whom) destroys their relationship (the god of small things).

Roy takes the story further and shows how caste-based bias overwhelms reason and humanity when a small-town communist party boss conspires with a brutal conniving police chief and an embittered family to avenge the lovers' "crimes" against convention. As might be expected, the hypocritical acts of authority make things worse.

Roy balances the joy of a tender love affair against the grim fate of women in a male-dominated society. As a young woman Ammu fled a tyrannical wife-beating father into a marriage of convenience. Her impulsively chosen husband, at first looked like a passport out of hell. He soon turned out to be an abusive alcoholic who tried to sell his wife into prostitution. The failed union leaves her burdened and blessed with inseparable twins, a girl Rahel, and a boy Estha who seem to share one mind. After divorce Ammu returns to an unwelcoming family. Her mother, psychologically crippled from her spouse's abuse, has no patience for a woman who would leave her husband. Ammu's brother Chacko, is brilliant scholar and a melancholy male chauvenist, who was rejected by his English wife after she realized he required a maid, and a mother more than needed a wife. Finally, Ammu is despised by a bitter, dried-out aunt who had the bad judgement to lust unsuccessfully after a Jesuit priest turned Hindu ascetic.

The twins are cynically implicated in the destruction of Ammu's affair with Velutha. Ammu is cast out of the family. Rahel and Estha are cruelly separated. Eventually, Rahel marries and then leaves an American husband because she cannot love him. Estha retreats into solitary silence. In a final bitter-sweet note of redemption the twins reunite as adults and console each other - "emptiness and quietness stacked together."

The theme of ill-fated lovers is commonplace. Those who dare to cross ingrained lines of prejudice, whether of tribal membership, wealth, skin color, education, etc. suffer the consequences. Ammu and Velutha are like Juliet and Romeo - they pay dearly for their brief moments of happiness. The reference to Shakespeare's tragedy fits the story. Roy sprinkles her tale with allusions to his plays and the works of other English writers, such as Kipling (The Jungle Books) and Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness). She stitches the themes and styles from these sources in a colorful patchwork. The book's power comes from the contrasting of pity for lover's tragedy, the children's imaginative and playful delight in their world, and the evil savagery committed in the name of justice.

Much of the book is narrated by Rahel, first as a grief-stricken adult, and then in the voice of a child reliving her mother's unhappy marriage, divorce, love affair, and punishment. The core of the story is a period of two weeks in which the love affair took root, flourished, and died. As memory jumps unexpectedly from one thought to another, so does the narrative thread zig-zag years back and forth across time from Rahel's childhood, to her adulthood, and across place including India, England, and America. Like guests at a dinner who sometimes interrupt with their own stories, Roy allows other characters to speak, including the chauvenist brother, the abused mother, the bitter aunt, the communist party boss and the police chief.

Roy seems to say that "small" unhappy marriages mirrors India's historical "big" unhappy misalliances with other countries. Foremost is the oppression that India experienced under the British empire. The Chinese communists brought violent and fruitless revolution. Western industrialization brought economic and ecological devastation. Through history India's partners took what they could, but left untouched its poverty, illiteracy, and caste-prejudice.

The constant changes of time, place, and voice may puzzle some readers. It helps to read the first chapter carefully once or twice before going on with rest of the book. The first chapter lays out the kernel of the story in broad strokes and the following chapters layer on detail - like peeling an onion in reverse. Like the monsoon rains that drench Kerala, this book will move you to tears. It is beautiful and well worth reading.

Was able to find a used copy claimed to be in like new condition. It was just as advertised. Enjoyed the book immensely

Reading this novel is akin to being reborn- as a snake eases out of its present coil and strips down to a more essential skin, so too will this violated madonna of lyricism attune you to the fundamentals of what it is to be human. This book strips away the veneer of polite society and illumes the central questions of humanity: why do we hate, love who we love and live as we do? At the end of this pulsating, haunting and all-seeing unveiling, I asked myself the overarching question that is central to each of our daily existence: why do I breathe?

This book has been mischaracterized as magic realism in the notes below. While people are entitled to call it whatever they want, if you want to revert to widely accepted definitions of the style, it isn't, not at all. And therein lies its power: there is no supernatural realm, no genius ghost, no divine intervention. This is us. Really, this is what we are. How can we address that which we carry within ourselves, escaping even our utterest exhaled breath? No matter how deep the sugared sighs of humankind, there is something so appalling that lurks in the human psyche that generally goes unacknowledged, and most people live it on a daily basis. This is one of the few works that can even hope to awake the quixotic part of us, that laments what we are, and gives hope that the reader's empathy will incite something better. This book turns the staid precepts of our world upside down: violation becomes salvation and successfully brings us to the searing understanding where the sickening is natural and right, because time honoured social convention fosters the blinding nightmare.

Only three writers have severely affected my ability to see the page in my life. I cried for Estha and Rahel, for two people who no one could ever understand except each other. I cried because to my knowledge this is the best book ever written on the caste system, and what it says about every single one of us. This is not just a book about India. It is a vast commentary on humanity, and most of all on love- that over-invoked, roughly used, oft bedraggled, and disregarded commodity.

The God of Small Things runs fingers of of feeling over your spine with its rivers of lyricism. It is fresh, insightful and sparkling- one of the great books of our time. There is no other work like it out there. Read it and see.

I read this book as a literature student in college and it is still one of my favorite books of all time. Her words read like poetry. It literally took my breath away in its beauty and message. Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about the effects of globalization on so-called Third World countries, as well as those who appreciate a good romantic novel in the magical realist tradition.

I had high hopes for this book when I picked it up. Halfway through this book and I find that I have to force myself to turn the next page. If you love reading interesting and in depth books that you can understand, this is not the book for you. The author's words are a spiral of mumbo jumbo that drags on and on. I often found myself re-reading the same sentence 3 or 4 times in order to grasp the meaning but it never comes. If I had to compare this book to something, I would compare it to a long a strange dream... it doesn't make sense and it's not something you would remember after 5 minutes!