Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 9/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 5 stars

I savored The God of Small Things. And savoring a book is a hard thing to do for a person not Reknowned for her patience. Someone whose personal tastes, normally, probably weight the page turner category a bit more than she should in the overall liking of a book. But not this time.

Cover of my copy of The God of Small Things. Check out the quote.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a masterpiece. I admit that I’ve nicked the word from the cover of my copy of the book which has a quote from a review that calls it ‘A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way’. But still.

The book is about the childhood lives (or really, a week in their life) of twins Esta and Rahel, their immediate family, and the not-so-immediate consequences of tragedy and loss. It is heartbreaking – but you know it will be from the start – so you have time to prepare. And time to be swept along with the current of the book.

When I first started thinking about what I would write about this book, the analogy that popped into my head was a lazy river. Where you sit back, close your eyes, and when you open them again you’ve got a heck of a lot further than you thought you had. You moved and didn’t realize, as you were so set focusing on the here-and-now. The Small Things. And yet there you are. At the end.

The imagery and the language of this book carry you along. I (obviously) like the use of the occasional capital letter for Emphasis. So does Roy. Who also mixes sentence length, type, and rhythm enough to give variety, but consistently enough to give unity. The book is lyrical.

The plot itself at first doesn’t seem to have that much to it, but it deepens and thickens (remember that river? the depths? murky waters?). Rahel has Returned ‘home’ after years and years away, at precisely the same age as her mother was when she died (a vi-able dieable age). And the story is told in flashbacks, only they are so seamlessly interwoven around Rahel’s interactions with the main characters that ‘flashback’ is far too jolting a word. The story unfolds as Rahel remembers and rediscovers. Again, you almost don’t notice.

The God of Small things is beautiful and profound. You know those people who unwrap presents tortuously slowly, not tearing a single bit of paper? It’s painful, but you can’t tear away your eyes. This book is sort-of-like that. It’s a gift.