Great book by Arundathi Roy. The writing is some of the most beautifuli have ever read but the story is weak and she often gets way too philosophical. Can see why it won the Booker prize though. Amazing writing.
Arundhati Roy’s writing in that book was highly mannerized and that does cloy before long. But one amazing thing about the book was that the huge amount of annoying cutesy-poo language mannerisms did not get in the way of a terrific story! The only way I can explain this is that she did in fact write a topnotch story, and throwing in all the excessive mannerisms was just a… heck, I don’t know why she wrote that way, but the fact that she got away with it says a lot for her as a writer.
There was something about the obsessive repetitiveness of certain leitmotifs (a fountain in a love-in-Tokyo, unusually dense dorsal tufts, the God of Loss) that helped to knit together an extremely fragmented narrative line. All the episodes were out of chronological order, and you couldn’t fit everything into place until you got all the way through the book. Vonnegut had his Billy Pilgrim become “unstuck in time.” Arundhati Roy had her whole narrative unstuck in time with a vengeance. Vonnegut at least provided commentary from outside the framework of Billy Pilgrim’s story. But Roy forces you to fit the puzzle pieces of her narrative together yourself—you have to do all the work. It’s worth the effort. The God of Small Things is a novel I will always remember and cherish for the finest erotic scene in all literature. She spends the whole book setting you up for that, and when she lets loose, the effect is devastating.
Buy this book and find out what a
Unique work of literature it is.
Minega deserves thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Perhaps other Dopers who have read it would like to comment…?