The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

At 321 pages this book took me a whole week to read when it should have only been a night. I could only bring myself to read a chapter at a time it was so tedious to get through.

It takes a brother and sister, twins, and jumps back and forth through their life. Sometimes it veers into a little background of the side characters but overall it is about Rahel and her brother Estha. When they are younger the tale is about the visit of their cousin Sophie Mol and her subsequent death. So much of the book is leading up to her death that when it finally happens it is really quite anticlimactic and doesn't even grace a full page of the book.

On the other side, one of the un-touchables frequently mentioned in the book has his beating and death graphically described for some time and the sex scene between him and the twin's mother is almost the whole chapter of the last book. Neither of which alludes to the rest of the story as a whole.

While Roy is lauded for her writing, I found that she used a few brilliant "literary" phrases; over and over and over and over. To the point where I kept feeling like I was reading the same chapter again and again. If I never hear or see the words "Puff" and "Two-egg Twins" again I will be exceedingly happy, as she seemed to use them on almost every page.

As far as the plot of the book I felt that the characters were uninteresting or connect-able. It felt like you kept reading to go nowhere in the story.

Overall I just didn't like the book. I know that many people do but my thought is that just because it is an important social issue, it doesn't make the book worth reading. Those social issues could be better explored through better writing.

The God Of Small Things
Copyright 1998
336 pages