The God of Small Things
By: Arundhati Roy / Narrated By: Sneha Mathan
Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
Lusciously written, fraught with commentary, and nary a plot to be found
Let’s just get this straight: I jumped right into The God of Small Things without reading anything about it except that it got rave reviews and earned some elite honors. All I DID read was that it was Fiction/Genre Fiction…
Uhm, I beg to disagree.
The book smacks of Literary Fiction, and yeh yeh yeh, I’m kinda not the best listener for such works as I most certainly appreciate a story when there are 11+ hours of written word.
Nope. The end of the “story” is up front at the beginning, and it’s interspersed heavily throughout. Then the end of the “story” rather begins the whole thing, and then it’s all over. …phew…!
The story is of two twins Esthappen and Rahel, brother and sister, and of the family upheaval they live through and of the societal upheaval of India during this thing that is at once a story of the twins and, at the same time, an epic family saga. Things are not good throughout their lives; things are not good throughout the book.
As a matter of fact, the whole book reminded me of that other Literary work (Which I loved!): Spill Simmer Falter Wither in that the writing was GLORious, and things go fatally awry many, many a time. One sees from both these books, jaw dropping prose and the ooooh so hideous that goes hand in hand with life. In the former book, two outcasts are on the run, bonded with each other. Here, EVERYbody is an outcast, esPECially the Untouchables, and there’s every form of betrayal and shallow carrot-on-a-stick motivator for each character.
This book has political troubles, lives cut short, deaths and violence, the need to live with sneering condescension. Plus there’s domestic abuse. Plus everybody is having ill-considered sex. Naturally this means there’s incest too.
So there’s that.
Ugly ugly ugly, and the book is structured with bouncing all over the timeline, back and forth, back and forth, in a manner one reviewer called: Brilliant. Rather, I found it to induce much head-scratching, and it really kept me on my toes. There was noooo thinking about anything BUT what was going on in the book, trying to wangle out a plot that quite simply wasn’t there, and desperately trying to care about the characters who are so self-absorbed that THAT was difficult.
Still, like I said, the writing is lovely, and I really felt India as a character in its own right, the desiccating heat, monsoon rains that drown until only pond scum remains as a source of life. The political unrest was given a face, and tragedy was given its due in the tiny form of the dead cousin Sophie (It’s not a spoiler, it’s EVERYwhere through the book, until we FINally get to where she dies, and it’s all given about two whole lines).
Also, Sneha Mathan narrates this brilliantly. As this is an intimate story folded up into an epic saga, there were a lot of demands on her for characters and for emotions. There’s a brutal, brutal, BRUTAL attack that’s perpetrated in the name of law and order, and Mathan relays it with spare and blunt force, nary an emotion to be found in something so horrific. Well-written scene, yes, but the performance of it: Wow!
Soooo, if you’re up for wallowing in the aforementioned pond scum of human depravity and all things sordid and tainted with betrayal and unrequited love, fear thee not:
This book has you covered!
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.