![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
2013 Book Review #46: The God of Small Things
Title: The God of Small Things
Author: Arundhati Roy
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: Twins in India try to make sense of a childhood tragedy.
Thoughts: Rarely have I read a story that was so fundamentally sad told in such a playful manner. Roy loves words, toys with them, rolls them around and pops them up in surprising ways. There is a humor and charm to this novel that softens the fact that literally nothing good happens to anyone. Yet despite the horrific tragedy that is the lives of basically all the characters, this doesn't feel like a relentless downer. Instead, it continues to be a celebration of the tiny moments throughout life and of the weirdness that is childhood.
The storytelling circles the plot gracefully--you know the results of the tragedy from the first few pages, but it's not until the last few that you finally get the full story of what actually happened. But it's done so deftly that where in less sure hands, it would have been frustrating, instead it just builds tension.
In short--this is what literary fiction aims to achieve and often fails to do. The events are not world-shattering, just life-shattering. The people are failable and make terrible mistakes. The language is gorgeous, the setting evocative, the themes haunting.
My one reservation is that I'm not sure how I feel about how the twins finally address their loss. It's a fairly controversial ending that the author caught a lot of flak for. The actions they take bother me less in and of themselves and more because it felt to me like it came a bit out of nowhere. It's presented almost as inevitable, but I do not see where that inevitability came from. He had me until that moment, lost me, and then grabbed me again when he circled back to the past for the last two pages. Still, it's an elegant and engaging piece of art.
Author: Arundhati Roy
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: Twins in India try to make sense of a childhood tragedy.
Thoughts: Rarely have I read a story that was so fundamentally sad told in such a playful manner. Roy loves words, toys with them, rolls them around and pops them up in surprising ways. There is a humor and charm to this novel that softens the fact that literally nothing good happens to anyone. Yet despite the horrific tragedy that is the lives of basically all the characters, this doesn't feel like a relentless downer. Instead, it continues to be a celebration of the tiny moments throughout life and of the weirdness that is childhood.
The storytelling circles the plot gracefully--you know the results of the tragedy from the first few pages, but it's not until the last few that you finally get the full story of what actually happened. But it's done so deftly that where in less sure hands, it would have been frustrating, instead it just builds tension.
In short--this is what literary fiction aims to achieve and often fails to do. The events are not world-shattering, just life-shattering. The people are failable and make terrible mistakes. The language is gorgeous, the setting evocative, the themes haunting.
My one reservation is that I'm not sure how I feel about how the twins finally address their loss. It's a fairly controversial ending that the author caught a lot of flak for. The actions they take bother me less in and of themselves and more because it felt to me like it came a bit out of nowhere. It's presented almost as inevitable, but I do not see where that inevitability came from. He had me until that moment, lost me, and then grabbed me again when he circled back to the past for the last two pages. Still, it's an elegant and engaging piece of art.