Name: Why should you read “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy? - Laura Wright
Uploaded: 2020-03-20T01:10:37.000Z
Duration: 4 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

“A few dozen hours can affect the  outcome of whole lifetimes/

And that when they do,  those few dozen hours,

like the salvaged remains  of a burned clock…

must be resurrected from the ruins  and examined.”

This is the premise of Arundhati Roy’s  1997 novel "The God of Small Things."

Set in a town in Kerala, India called  Ayemenem,

the story revolves around fraternal  twins Rahel and Estha,

who are separated for 23 years  after the fateful few dozen hours

in which their cousin drowns, their  mother’s illicit affair is revealed,

While the book is set at the point of  Rahel and Estha’s reunion,

the narrative takes place mostly in the past, reconstructing the details

around the tragic events that  led to their separation.

Roy’s rich language and masterful  storytelling

earned her the prestigious Booker prize  for "The God of Small Things."

In the novel, she interrogates the culture of her native India,

including its social mores  and colonial history.

a way of classifying people by hereditary  social class

the original four castes associated  with specific occupations

had been divided into  some 3000 sub-castes.

Though the caste system was  Constitutionally abolished in 1950,

it continued to shape  social life in India,

routinely marginalizing people  of lower castes.

In the novel, Rahel and Estha have a  close relationship with Velutha,

a worker in their family’s pickle factory

and member of the so-called  “untouchable” caste.

When Velutha and the twins’ mother, Ammu, embark on an affair,

they violate what Roy describes as the  “love laws”

forbidding intimacy between  different castes.

Roy warns that the tragic consequences  of their relationship

“would lurk forever in ordinary things,”  like “coat hangers,” “the tar on roads,”

Roy’s writing makes constant use of these  ordinary things,

bringing lush detail to even the most  tragic moments.

The book opens at the funeral of the  twins’ half-British cousin Sophie

As the family mourns, lilies curl and  crisp in the hot church.

Tears drip from a chin like  raindrops from a roof.

The novel forays into the past to explore the characters’ struggles

to operate in a world  where they don’t quite fit,

alongside their nation’s  political turmoil.

Ammu struggles not to lash out at her  beloved children

when she feels particularly trapped in her parents’ small-town home,

where neighbors judge and shun her  for being divorced.

Velutha, meanwhile, balances his affair with Ammu and friendship with the twins

not only with his employment  to their family,

but also with his membership to a  budding communist countermovement

to Indira Ghandi’s “Green Revolution.”

In the 1960s, the misleadingly named  “Green Revolution”

introduced chemical fertilizers  and pesticides

While these policies produced high-yield  crops that staved off famine,

they also forced people from lower castes  off their land

and caused widespread  environmental damage.

When the twins return to Ayemenem  as adults,

the consequences of the Green Revolution  are all around them.

The river that was bursting with life  in their childhood

greets them “with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been,

and a limp hand raised  from a hospital bed.”

As Roy probes the depths of human  experience,

she never loses sight of the way her  characters are shaped

by the time and the place where they live.

In the world of "The God of Small Things,"

“Various kinds of despair competed  for primacy…

personal despair could never be  desperate enough...

personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling,

driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible  public turmoil of a nation.”