The God of Small Things (1997)

by Arundhati Roy

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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Some of us liked the book and others were frustrated by the often unfluid movement between time-frames, making the narration often confusing. Themes of love, childhood, families and decay. (

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Bibliofemmes | Jan 14, 2017 |

Roy's prose is lyrical and inventive, and the main narrative is an engaging, and finally devastating, indictment of the caste system, seen through the eyes of children. I didn't think the payoff was there in the end, though, and at times the style was too self-conscious, too overwrought. (

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jalbacutler | Jan 10, 2017 |

This book was so ridiculously amazing (

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joshanastasia | Oct 20, 2016 |

Shows great promise for a young writer. A definite recommend. The physical and emotional descriptions go on a bit long, but are completely forgivable. Eventually they arrive at a lovely place. Touching. A nice literary escape. (

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zoegreenfeld | Sep 20, 2016 |

I'm not against consensual incest (say what you will), and the book is influential. (

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dxrsam | Aug 12, 2016 |

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thingScore 75

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. She writes near the beginning of the novel that in India, personal despair ''could never be desperate enough,'' that ''it was never important enough'' because ''worse things had happened'' and ''kept happening.'' Yet as rendered in this remarkable novel, the ''relative smallness'' of her characters' misfortunes remains both heartbreaking and indelible.

added by Shortride | editThe New York Times, Michiko Kakutani (Jun 3, 1997)

▾Other authors

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Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Roy, Arundhati	—	primary author	all editions	confirmed
Lundborg, Gunilla	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

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Series (with order)

Canonical title

The God of Small Things

Original title

The God of Small Things

Alternative titles

Original publication date

People/Characters

Important places

Important events

Related movies

Awards and honors

Booker Prize (1997)

BBC's Big Read (Best loved novel, 2003, No 85)

New York Times bestseller (Fiction, 1997)

Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year (1997.6|Fiction (5), 1997)

Whitcoulls top 100, 2008 (92)

(show all 10 items)

Epigraph

Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.

John Berger

Dedication

For Mary Roy, who grew me up. Who taught me to say "excuse me" before interrupting her in Public. Who loved me enough to let me go. For LKC, who, like me, survived.

First words

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.

Maj je v Ajemenemu vroč, morast mesec.

Quotations

"D'you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

"Just ignore her," Ammu said. "She's just trying to attract attention."

Ammu too was wrong. Rahel was trying to not attract the attention that she deserved.

Rahel looked around her and saw that she was in a Play. But she had only a small part.
She was just the landscape. A flower perhaps. Or a tree.
A face in the crowd. A Townspeople.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-coloured puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-coloured minds.

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. With a Sitting Down sense.

(show all 12 items)

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Kakutani, Michiko

Updike, John

Publisher series

Biblioteca Sábado (52)

Harper Perennial

Original language

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▾Book descriptions

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0060977493, Paperback)

In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:23:37 -0400)

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▾Library descriptions

The story of an Indian family during the 1969 Communist disturbances in Kerala province. It is told through the eyes of a boy and his sister who are the children of a rich rubber planter. Politics, family drama, illicit love. A debut in fiction.

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