12 January 2009

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Beginning with this year's booklist, I'm going to try to write mini-reviews for what I've read. I'll post them here on the blog, too.
Also, I am now shopping around for web hosting, though I am going to first design and write some pages for my site.

Here's the review I wrote up for book #03 of this year:
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things – her first novel – demonstrates her remarkable ability to capture the effects of a single day’s events. Her novel follows the story of a family in India, fluidly intertwining through time rather than tracing a chronological path. The author reveals how small actions can be grow to enormous, nearly disastrous, proportions. The history told of these characters carries the echo of the grander history outside their own world, of India and of human life. Roy is fantastic in her ability to write in the voices of the twin children, Estha and Rahel, changing the structure of the English language to reflect the purity of youth. The reader learns in due course about the tragic happening that has destroyed that purity, though Roy carefully holds the reader in an aching state of half-knowing until the end. Arundhati Roy shows in this novel that she is gifted with not only the art of poetic language, but also with the craft of weaving a deeply resonant narrative.
You'll rush through it with a sense of urgency (so in that way, it's a fast read). I'd love to give it a re-read to catch the things I missed the first time through.

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