Detailed item info | Synopsis | A pair of twins in Kerala, India--Rahel and her brother, Estha--struggle to maintain a life in the midst of the wreckage of their family. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1997.
| | Size | | Length: | 321 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in. | | Width: | 6.3 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 18.4 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | "They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much." The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . .Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes--Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it".
| | Industry reviews | "Unfortunately, Roy has dressed much of her book in an ambitious gorgeousness that she often lacks the dexterity to manage. She inflates story into epic, the modest magic of perception into an occasional clumsy piece of magic realism, and the erotic current between pickle princess and carpenter into an avalanche, resembling a Hollywood musical crescendo."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Richard Eder (06/01/1997)
"Although 'The God of Small Things' opens with memories of a family grieving around a drowned child's coffin, there are plenty of other intimate horrors still to come....Yet the quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary--at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple--that the reader remains enthralled all the way through to its agonizing finish."
New York Times Book Review - Alice Truax (05/25/1997)
"[S]ome of Roy's finest touches spring from her skill at registering the unsayable terrors lodged below the surface of everyday things, in particular, the terrors which take hold of the children....'The God of Small Things' is a cleverly crafted, often witty and moving first novel by a talented new writer."
Times Literary Supplement - Shirley Chew (05/03/1997)
"If Ms. Roy is sometimes overzealous in foreshadowing her characters' fate, resorting on occasion to darkly portentous clues, she proves remarkably adept at infusing her story with the inexorable momentum of tragedy....As rendered in this remarkable novel, the 'relative smallness' of her characters' misfortunes remains both heartbreaking and indelible."
Kakutani
"Like a devotionally built temple, 'The God of Small Things' builds a massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details."
Updike
"If the ending, when it comes, is slightly too predictable, it doesn't matter, because, like everything else in this remarkable meditation on storytelling and thwarted desire, it's carefully set up and beautifully rendered."
Todd
"A rarity in post-colonial fiction: a largely-conceived and ambitious book about private life."
Gorra
"Roy, an architect and screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, capably shoulders the burdens of caste and tradition, a double weight that crushes some of her characters and warps others, but leaves none untouched....Roy takes up classic material, but she delights in verbal innovation and stylistic tricks. She runs words together...and plucks nouns from verbs and verbs from thin air....Roy's verbal exuberance is all her own, and it makes "The God of Small Things" a real pleasure. History's lessons may be bitter, but Roy serves them up fresh, pungent and delicious."
Howard
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