The story makes references to the communist movement in the region (there are some evident communist characters), and the author also makes powerful observations on the issues of castle, discrimination, gender inequality, colonialism, religion and politics. Her purpose it to visit her twin brother Estha, and, while there, she starts to recall the events that happened just before and after the arrival of her cousin Sophie Mol to India. The novel starts with a thirty-one year old Rahel returning to the house of her childhood in Ayemenem.
At the height of all the excitement, however, everyone is quite oblivious to the dangers lurking just on the periphery of their lives, and these dangers seem to just wait for all the circumstances to conspire in their favour to strike the final blow into the very heart of the small lives of Ayemenem.
Her father and the twins’ uncle Chacko is welcoming his ex-wife Margaret and his daughter to India. However, the twins are not concerned with the Big Things, and are eagerly anticipating the arrival of their nine-year old English cousin Sophie Mol. This is a turbulent time to grow up because there is political unrest and uncertainty in the country, and financial and other hardships, as well as all kinds of injustice, are seen as just part and parcel of life. It takes a cross-generational approach to tell the story, but at the heart of the plot is a pair of twins – brother and sister – seven-year old Estha and Rahel respectively – who grow up in Ayemenem, part of Kerala, India, in the late 1960s. The notable feature of the book is that it is a debut novel which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is that book to me.
Once in awhile a book comes your way which is so powerful in its message, so inexplicably poetic in its presentation and so wondrous in its understated emotion that you may wonder how come you have not read it yet.
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