The God of Small Things: A Novel

It's ten-to-two. It's ten-to-two on Rahel's painted watch. It’s ten-to-two on Rahel’s painted watch which lies under the revolved earth of The History House in the Heart of the Darkness. It’ll be always ten-to-two on the stillness of Roy’s book as the derailed freight train of her story slams into our hearts. It’ll be always ten-to-two when Sorrow, Pain, Unrequited Love, Too Much Love, and Unbearable, yet Understandable, Truths of Life collapse from their wagons and bury us all under them; It’ll be always ten-to-two as the train’s sharp wheels scar our souls as deep as the ugly scars on Mammachi’s head, her blind soul carefully hidden by the gray hair and they will be there forever, for us to carry. Ours will be beautiful scars. Scars… Healed scars. Scars healed by Unbearable Forbidden Necessary Cleaning Love, which will always be able to follow the Music escaping from a tangerine radio as it floats in the Air. The Still Air of Life. The Air of Roy’s story is filled with the haunting Truths of Life, so heavy to carry, they need to be shared, breathed by the twins, Esthappen, the boy-man, and Rahel, the girl-woman, as One. They are so horrible to be spoken of, that Rahel’s eyes becomes empty, empty with everything and Estha stops speaking, speaking with all. Inside. But the Truths of Life leak as Mammachi’s Pickles’ bottles have leaked, impossible to be tamed into perfection, silent as a mute shriek of grief, imperceptible as a light cutting deep into darkness. As History evolves and revolves as the round World we live in, the skyblue old Plymouth, with its painted rack falling apart, thunders the careening story of Life and Death. Life and Death. Love and Hate. Angels and Demons. Humans and Beasts. Happiness and Rules. The Big Things and The Small Things, which in a reversal of their inherent nature belonged to the Small light God, who sweeps clean his steps as he walks backward, and the Big powerful God (god?), who stomps into the House with his dirty, muddied boots. Roy leads us past glass of pickles and jellies of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, the factory; past The Sound of Music, the film; and past childhood, marriage, madness, pedophilia, poverty, violence, injustice and betrayal. And love, so much love. With no mercy, she tows us past the lost, hidden beauties and still there horrors of India; past confused Indians, immersed in caste hierarchy and lost in the war between British Imperialism and Karl Marx Communism; forced Evangelism; past Elvis Presley, Oxford, Coca-Cola, American TV shows and London life; all preferred, favorites in spite of the unique, laid-to-waste-in-twenty-minutes Kathakali dance. And she dresses us in saris of intolerance sewed carefully by single, married and widowed women and she gives us the painted masks of their unavailable, chauvinist kinsmen. For us, she disrobes the once-one turned-lonely children and two couples of forbidden lovers - who had already been bared, robbed… Loved less… The four of them The Gods of Small Things. And she makes us watch the Terror and the Love. I read this in two seatings only because I had to get a couple of hours’ sleep. I was frozen in my armchair, fossilized in time by the unjustified justice of my few smiles and many tears; nerves uncapped, shaking, almost hiding, as I saw many of my thoughts being SHOUTED OUT LOUD at me, from me. Will I read it again? Yes. Later. (Lay. Ter.) Now, I need a moment. Of quiet emptiness. To rage. Et tu, English, Indians, Christians, Syrian Christians, Hindus, Pelaya, Pulaya, Paravan, Touchables and Untouchables, Lower Middle Upper Classes, No Classes, all-and-yet-never Comrades! Who saw and looked away! Et tu, Sophie Mol! The unfortunate English child killed-killer of the simple happiness of Rahel's and Estha’s childhood, the two-egg twin that was only One. Et tu, Pappachi, the Imperial Entomologist, domestic abuser, proud and full of cruel, ugly moths; Mammachi, the almost-blind beaten-wife and example of Christian beatitude; Vellya Paapen, the one with a mortgaged glass eye and the real blind one; Baby grand aunt Kochamma, the gullible girl turned bitter-sour, with her perfect Per-Nun-Ciation and unfair, hasty judgements and psychologic torture! Who played alone-along their parts, ignorantly not knowing life was no rehearsal! Et tu, poor Rahel and Estha! Children so loved less, from the Beginning until the End, the only one, forever un-living-dead bearers’ of short sad lives and long alive deaths, who didn't know how to do otherwise. Et tu, All-of-Us! Who are rehearsing the Play and making Black Holes in the Universe, while out-of-our-minds, we count our Keys, looking into the void-avoiding the smelly injustice being distributed! What it worth it? The price to pay for a forbidden love? Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I will need to read it again. Later. Now, I need a moment. Of empty quietness. To Praise. To Love. But no words of mine would do justice to Roy’s work of art, so leave me here, hurting and loving, stabbed in the back by my own hand with the Truths of my your our Life, accepting a bit more of myself you this world, and read this real, poetic, sad, grand, too-small-to-be-contained Book. And the Kathakali dancers danced and their drummers drummed, to ask pardon of their Gods, as we also should do for the daily, unconscious murder of our Gods of Small Things. While it’s ten-to-two. Before it’s too late… ——————————————————————— In the light of my last review of another book, where I closed its ebook covers at 20% because of typos, missing commas, too-many-grand-long-forgotten words and foreign mottos written wrongly, loose-lost opinions about historical facts, and over-the-top “'pumpkin bums’ descriptions of nothing-happening-to-many-characters-that-had-nothing-to-do-with-any-one”, I think that to be fair to those who read my reviews, I owe an explanation to my 5 star rating for ‘The God of Small Things’. Roy took me through the creation and death of an ornamental garden; made me sat in a church filled with ants, a baby bat and a dead child. I traveled in a bluesky Plymouth on a road full of frog stains while she uses foreign words, many half-full sentences, repeated ideas and (over-the-top, some will say) analogies. I consulted the dictionary more than a couple of times, as English is not my mother language and she uses words I was not familiar with (Probably, I would have to consult the Portuguese dictionary too). She made me wait, as a pregnant woman waits, as I read story upon story of many different characters, who seemed to have nothing to do with Rahel and Estha or anyone else, but were all linked somehow by society and social relationships. Yes, this book could have been smaller, but it could have been bigger. But if it were different, then it wouldn’t be ‘The God of Small Things’. I didn’t closed the book at 20% and I rated her work 5 stars. Why? Because. Because there are books and books; authors and authors. Because I don’t care if another author has used a style before Roy used it. I don’t care if there is another author who does it better than she did it. What readers and reviewers sometimes don’t understand is that gifted authors are often gifted-avid-readers, with screaming souls begging to be set free; who drown in the works they have read and let them soak in and soothe their pains. These authors are allowed to use all the styles as their own, without being accused of stealing them, as I’ve seen a few reviewers raging about. And I tell you that as an avid reader with a newly-freed author’s soul, hoping to be one day as gifted as Roy. Because what I care is that, in Roy’s work, there are magical, complex, centuries of old-untold relationships to be read about, learned and admired, in the middle of the marvel unseemly-going-nowhere descriptions of a ripple fruit bursting and an orange sun setting. Because Roy’s Universe is raw and rough, a few times sweet, filled with her beautiful, sharp-edged opinions - that some may think prejudiced - but are historically based and lived. She tells us an Indian story that could have been a Brazilian story. My story. Your story. Because what I care is that, without asking my permission, Roy took my soul and gave it back; Sadder for a moment, but more knowledgeable and fuller of passion. Because this is not a book for everyone, but for those who live life on its full, and are grateful for the possibility that, even being of die-able age, they are still alive; for those who are interested in relationships and its octopus sucking tentacles; for those who are mindful of how cruel the world can be and yet are able to see the beauty of a sunset and a strict forbidden incest love told in poetical, not-rhymed words; for those who can stand up for others in need. For those who love. “Because Anything can Happen to Anyone. It’s Best to be Prepared.” Arundhati Roy, in The God of Small Things ——————————————————————— P.S. 1 - If in your ebook you stumble upon lost inverted commas, dizzy dashes and en-dashes, overlook them. They are just simple typos - perhaps there on purpose, who knows? This book is like a child or a loved-lover, who should never be loved less, for his perchance carelessness, because it belongs to the Universe of Rippling Truths of Life.

The author goes back and forth from the past to the present. At first, I found this annoying. However, I begin to admire that the author had her own rules for writing this novel. There are instances where there is no standard punctuation. There are similes I found indefinable. I would reread a passage trying to get the gist of what the author conveyed The main characters are the fraternal twins, Rahel, daughter and Esthappen (Estha), son, the children of Ammu, a divorcé, her lover, Velutha, a Paravan (untouchable). The story begins with the funeral of Sophie Mol, cousin and playmate of the twins. Sophie Mol was the daughter of Ammu’s brother, Chacko and his former wife, Englishwoman, Margaret Kochamma. Sophie and Margaret had recently arrived from England at the invitation of Chacko after the death of Margaret’s second husband. Ammu and the twins are forbidden to sit with the family during the funeral service. The reason will be revealed later. A disillusioned Ammu, married to an abusive alcoholic, returned to the family home in Ayemenem. Her father, John Ipe (Pappachi) does not believe her husband’s English boss requested he sleep with her. At home, she is expected to live out her days, in shame at divorcing her husband. After his failed marriage and the death of their father, John, Chacko, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, returned home to manage his mother’s pickle business. Home is where Chacko and Ammu’s blind mother, Shoshamma Ipe, known as Mammachi (grandmother) resides. Mammachi founded and owned the Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory. Also living in the home are the twins’ deceitful, vindictive, unmarried, paternal great-aunt, Baby Kochamma. Throughout the novel, Baby Kochamma is devoted to self-interest. She is the catalyst who revealed life and death are in the power of the tongue. Kochu Maria (little Maria), is the family cook. This book gives a brief glimpse at the social mores of India concerning the “Untouchables.” Historically the country was divided among caste and color lines; an ancient system that rejected their fellow countrymen with discrimination, violence, persecution and social exclusion. In the book, the family’s bias is expressed with profound intensity when it is discovered Ammu and the brilliant and likable Velutha are having an affair. Velutha was the intelligent, skilled artisan, awarded a high position in the pickle factory by Mammachi. Even Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen, was angry and horrified at his son “crossing the line.” Vellya felt indebted to Mammachi. She had purchased his artificial eye and treated his family well. The author’s vivid description of Mammachi’s deep-seated anger toward the “messenger,” Vellya, Velutha’s father, with Velutha was profound. Although blind, Mammachi’s vile denunciations and spittle hit their mark. Mammachi’ showed tolerance for her son Chacko’s “men’s needs” when he sexually exploited the female factory workers. However, she expressed intolerance for Ammu’s tender love affair with Velutha. Ammu was locked away in her room. As I read this book, I discovered the childhood terror witnessed by Rahel and Estha had damaged them emotionally as adults. Estha refused to communicate. As children, the twins were very close and had their own way of communicating. They even read backwards. Chacko, the weak-willed, indolent son, manipulated by Baby Kochamma’s promptings, ejected his sister, Ammu, from their home. Baby Kochamma is the “keeper of honor,” the traditionalist, and advocate of the caste system. Because of her deceit, she has her own reasons for wanting Ammu ousted and the children gone. I will not give the reasons away, but she strikes fear in the children’s hearts. I believe the small things are Velutha and Ammu’s love. He loved her children and they him. Ammu and Velutha were two kindred spirits. Theirs was a love affair that maybe even today would be unthinkable and not permitted in Indian society. But 40 years ago, they could have no future, so they made no plans. They lived for each night together. Although during the late sixties and early seventies, this was considered a patriarchal society, the women are strong characters. Mammachi was an accomplished violinist, later in life she was founder and owner of Paradise Pickles and Preserves, much to the annoyance of a violently abusive husband. I admired Ammu’s resilience. She defended herself against her husband, Baba’s, physical abuse, refused to sleep with his English boss and ultimately divorced him. I admired that she ignored the caste system and found love with Velutha. Velutha had an important role. Much of the conflict involved him, but in some instances he appeared almost invisible to me. I saw him as tender and loving with Ammu. A socialist, a man who desired change in his country. The prosaic love scene between Ammu and Velutha were beautifully written. The brief violence in the book is powerfully written too. I felt queasy reading it. I would have enjoyed more on the ill-fated lovers, Ammu and Velutha. Although the caste system and discrimination has been outlawed, I think Arundhati Roy’s book reveals what is still prevalent today, cruel and often inhumane treatment of India’s “Untouchables.” I think the author conveyed how deeply embedded the caste system is. How it destroys and demeans human lives and stereotypes them. Toward the end, Ammu’s outcome was sorely missed. The relationship that developed between the twins was perplexing. Imagery and symbolisms are common throughout the book. This novel would stimulate avid conversation in a book club.

This book won the Booker Prize for Literature. And "in my book," it's also a world-class (as well as world-lit) winner, heartbreaking, haunting, and wise. The main action takes place in India in 1969, but it jumps around in time. As the author put it, the story "begins at the end and ends in the middle." So we know from the beginning that there has been a terrible tragedy that permanently affected the lives of fraternal twins Estha (boy) and Rahel (girl.) The book is about finding out exactly what it was that happened; and how and why it happened. I guessed most of the answer pretty early on, but I think that was the intent of the author. The book is more about the process than the solution, and she gives the reader plenty of hints, respecting the reader's intelligence and gently guiding him or her to figure out the answer for himself or herself. It's not so much a novel of mystery or suspense as it is one of psychology (of both personality and relationships) and social commentary. Ms. Roy shows enormous insight into her characters and their situation, and while the writing is deceptively lovely and easy to read, The God of Small Things has a great deal of depth. Some of her insight comes from writing about what she knows. Parts of the story are autobiographical. Arundhati Roy grew up in the same rural town in India where the book is set, and her grandmother really did own and run a pickle factory. A recipe for Banana Jam is included which not only sounds delicious, but also easily doable for the average American cook. (I'm totally fascinated by how the banana puree turns scarlet red as it cooks. I've got to try that!) Since the reader has already mostly figured out what happened, in a way the big "reveal" scene in which the full tragedy is described in detail, is anti-climactic; and again I feel certain that this is deliberate. It is as if Ms. Roy wants us to focus on the characters - why they each behaved as they did, and how they were affected, rather than the actual events. There are still a couple of surprises coming, though. Yet even with those, one feels less surprise than might be expected. There's a sense of, "Of course - I should have seen that coming." Because although the author hasn't given us any hints about those particular surprises, she has set up a certain subtle and carefully-crafted atmosphere in which such surprising/shocking/awful things become the natural or logical cause (in one case) or consequence (in the other case.) And this ability of hers to hit us with a big surprise while making it seem not all that surprising, is part of Ms. Roy's genius. The ending is also anti-climactic, and yet again this is clearly the author's intent. Partly this is because the book ends, as she says, in the middle. I think that, after all the tragedy and loss of the the story, she wanted us to leave the book on a note of gentleness, love, and hope. Social commentary is a strong theme throughout this work. (Arundhati Roy became a social activist after it was published to such acclaim that she was able to wield considerable influence.) As an adjunct to that, the breaking of taboos and the consequences of that are two major story lines. In one, the consequences are terrible. Yet later, an even more pervasive (across many cultures) and powerful taboo is broken without any noticeable consequence. In fact, Roy has prepared the reader so well that the taboo act comes across as natural, appropriate, and even a positive thing for the characters involved. It is a brilliant and thought-provoking juxtaposition. I was totally charmed by the way this author plays with the English language. She thinks out of the box: breaks the rules in such a way that it makes sense, rather than causing chaos and confusion. She capitalizes certain words against the rules of grammar, as a very successful way of emphasizing them (". . . life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever . . . "). She makes up words, often by combining one or more words ("a viable die-able age" "sicksweet", "a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping", "dullthudding") or by deliberate misspellings ("Infinnate"). The result is a sense of non-native-English-speakers' minds, a foreign perspective and way of thinking; or perhaps the perspective of a child. Either way, that is so fitting for the setting of the book. And it's much the same as the way she breaks the rules of structure (i.e., rules of chronology, de-emphasizing the climax, letting us guess the answer to the mystery early on, etc.) in ways that work, that beautifully and creatively accomplish what she is trying to do with the book. She's an ultimate example of how someone with a thorough knowledge of the rules can know when and how to break them. The God of Small Things is an outstanding work of fiction, one that I think fully deserves its award and acclaim. So far it is Ms. Roy's only novel, as she has been occupied in the decade since its publication with social activism. However, the Kindle edition that I read included an interview with the author in which she says that she is now writing a new book. I hope that it is finished and published soon. I would love to read more of her work. Quotes from The God of Small Things: "Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcée-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims. What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of the suice bomber." "He trembled his own body like a man with malaria." "It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do." "It's true. Things can change in a day." (321 pages)

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.

This novel covers three generations of an Indian family, from the grandfather to the grandsons, living in Kerala, a village in India. The author describes and portrays each of the characters perfectly, but I found them aloof and could not connect with them. She centers on the young twins, Estha and Rahel. I was very excited to read this book after reading so many favorable reviews and learning that it had been awarded the Booker Prize. Nevertheless, I found it very difficult to follow for several reasons. It focuses a lot on India and its way of life, something aloof to me, but it also goes back and forth in time, and there came a point where I did not know what was going on. When she wrote about something that was happening and followed a certain flow, I wanted to know more, but suddenly, things changed and she started with a different idea. Another thing that is difficult for me to follow is magic realism, and I found a lot of it in here. I do not doubt it is a wonderful book, but I did not like it despite making the effort to finish it.

Arundhati Roy has a new book, her second novel, out this year and much acclaimed. I want to read it, but in thinking about that book, I remembered her remarkable debut novel, The God of Small Things, which was published twenty years ago in 1997. I had read the book back then, but in recalling it today, I found that its details had blurred and I wanted to read it again. And so I did. It was even better the second time around. Perhaps my life experience in the last twenty years has given me a greater appreciation of the story. Roy's luminous prose makes reading an unadulterated pleasure, even when she is describing the tragic events of this tale. The story of fraternal ("two-egg" in the language of the book) twins Esthappen and Rahel and their childhood in the state of Kerala in the southern tip of India, as they try to understand and come to terms with their fractured family and as they learn to their eternal sorrow that the events of one day can change things forever, is a story which everyone who has ever been a child should be able to relate to. Moreover, I thought the structure which Roy gave to the story was absolutely brilliant in its conception and execution. She begins the story at its end and ends it at its beginning and, throughout, the action slips effortlessly back and forth between the present and the beginnings in 1969. The twins and their mother, Ammu, had returned to the family home in Ayemenem after the mother divorced her abusive drunkard husband. But because of the divorce, she is considered an outcast and she and her children are resented by the family, especially by her aunt, Baby Kochamma, a woman whose own desire for love has been thwarted. In fact, everyone in this fraught household has been thwarted in love in one way or another. Ammu's brother, Chako (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, and radical Marxist), had married a woman in England but after their daughter was born, the first bloom of love faded and she left him for another man. Then, he, too, returned to Ayemenem. Ammu's and Chako's mother, Mammachi, is a widow, now blind, who was regularly beaten by her husband with a brass pot when he was alive. In this atmosphere of frustrated desires, Ammu must try to raise her children and give them happy lives. The caste system is still very much a part of society in India in 1969 and it pollutes relations at every level. The twins have a friend, teacher, and protector in Velutha, a member of the Untouchable caste. He is someone who grew up with their mother. The two children love him by day, but, in secret, their lonely mother loves him at night. It is, of course, a forbidden love and one that can only end in grief. The catalyst for the tragedy to come is the Christmas visit to the home by Chako's ex-wife, Margaret, and his beloved daughter, Sophie. It's impossible to further describe the plot without spoilers. Suffice to say that no one escapes unchanged. Roy loads her narrative with foreshadowing so that one feels a constant sense of trepidation and anxiety. When the worst happens, it is hardly a surprise and yet the reader is still devastated. What strikes me as most tragic is not so much the suffering of these flawed characters, but the fact that such suffering is so commonplace. We are reading of the effects of the caste system in India in the 1960s; it might just as easily be about racism, misogyny, xenophobia in America today. Human nature has not improved in the last fifty years. In that regard, sadly, Roy's story stands up very well to the passage of time.

This novel is everything that the many reviewers, both positive and negative, say it is. That's because it is overflowing with things both good and bad; it is all superabundance, superfluity and sometimes surfeit. Suzanna Arundhati Roy is a phenomenally gifted young writer simply gushing with words and perceptions, but unable to resist them, contain them, or cut them down with the cruel, revising severity of an older master. And so the reader, happy for the rich fare, but feeling a bloat coming on from the excess of sweets and carbohydrates, must pass by the later servings with some degree of displeasure. Yet, overall, it's not right to turn up your nose at a feast. The most difficult part of the repast is the beginning. THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, following the model of Salman Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, is very much a novel about family relationships. The author apparently wants the reader to enter the story in media res, as if suddenly transported to Southwestern India and stuck in a village without explanation. That device works up to a point, but beyond it precise information is needed as to who is who and how everyone is related. Roy never gives a decent accounting and seems almost spitefully to mix things up. As I read I found that I had to make a list of the characters and constantly revise it. An explanatory cast of characters should appear at the front of the book, but since it does not I think the best service I can provide to prospective readers is to offer my list. It is based mostly on early information, so does not give the story away: SETTING: the Hindu village of Ayemenem (not on maps), near Kottayam (on some maps) in the State of Kerala, which lines the southwestern tip of India; the village is two hours distant from the coastal town of Cochin (on detailed maps). The language is Malayalam. MAIN CHARACTERS: Soshamma Mammachi--the grandmother, owns a pickle factory called "Paradise." Papachi--the grandfather, 17 years older, a retired government entomologist. Ammu--daughter of Mammachi and Papachi, mother of the twins, divorced from Baba, 27 years old in 1969. Baba--the alcoholic father, goes to work in Calcutta and takes his son Estha with him; then 23 years later returns him to Ayemenem and moves to Australia. Estha (Esthappen Yako)--their son, first of the dizygotic twins, born November 1962. Rahel--their daughter, second of the dizygotic twins by 18 minutes; she marries and divorces the architect Larry McCaslin and returns to Ayemenem from America when she learns that Estha has returned. Chako--only son of Mammachi and Papachi, brother of Ammu, uncle of the twins, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Margaret Kochamma--English ex-wife of Chako. Sophie Mol--their daughter, dead at 9, cousin to the twins. Velutha ("white")--son of Vellya Paapen, born 1945, a Paravan (untouchable), handyman and carpenter. Baby Kochamma (Navomi Ipe)--sister of Papachi, grand aunt of the twins, once a Roman Catholic nun (not related to Margaret Kochamma). E. John Ipe--her father, blessed as a boy by the Patriarch of Antioch, head of the Syrian Christian Church. Kochin Maria--her midget maid. The above list gives dates and ages as the author provides them, but try as you might it is awfully hard to determine exactly what are the years of the two main planes of action. The author likes to shift from one to the other, so that a sense of timelessness is created, but once certain dates are given it is irritating not to have the chief ones, and one cannot escape the feeling that the author is being intentionally obscure. Possibly she could write the whole thing in Malayalam and the Malayalam reader would grasp everything, but if the medium is English then some concessions to the wider foreign culture should be made. As for the feast, nearly every idea of consequence is compared to something else, and not one simile will do, when two or three can be found. The memory of Sophie Mol, for example, becomes ever-present, like “a quiet thing in socks... like a fruit in season... as permanent as a government job.” These multiple comparisons, however fresh, are added to a text already stuffed with colors, tastes and quirky associations. Once a brilliant image is discovered, it is not used once, or even a few times, but is repeated incessantly to the end, as, for example, the trick of describing a character, say Ammu, as “an Ammu-shaped hole in the universe.” Eventually everybody becomes an X-shaped hole in the universe. And the little verbal habits, chatter and jingles of the characters, such as the childish “dum dum” added at the end of a thought, delightful at the start, become cloying and sickening by the end. There is a problem with names. Roy never gives the last names of characters, but sometimes gives Indian (presumably Malayalam) designations or terms in their stead. Thus the mother of the story is called Ammu, and her children call her “Ammu,” but so does everyone else. Evidently she is just generally Mother, and we never get a first or last name. (Or I got it wrong.) Similarly “Chako” appears to mean “uncle,” yet other characters seem to call the man by this name, while the kids are forbidden to do so. Readers of English would expect the characters called Baby Kochamma and Margaret Kochamma to be related, but they are not: the first is an old Indian; the second is a young Englishwoman who married into the family. “Kochamma,” then, must indicate a status (non-Hindu, non- Muslim?) which is never explained. Or is it a last name? Similarly “Mol” is added on occasion to the name of a girl and “Mon” to the name of a boy, without explanation All the same, there are wonderful things here. Roy, being fearless, lapses on occasion into bad taste, revoltingly bad taste, but in her best moments achieves a sublime portrayal of life as severe and unsparing as Joseph Conrad. The reader inclined by her child's-point-of-view narrative to place all good in childhood and all evil in maturity should reflect on a little scene in which two girls are stepping on ants: one wants to kill them all, but the other wants to leave one so "it will be lonely." Here, as in other scenes, is the remorseless eye of a great artist.

so intense and tragic story.