by ELG Gray

The God of Small Things

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.

01.12.14

by ELG Gray

A Passage to India

Page-turner: 7/10
Heart-tugger: 7/10
Thought-provoker: 8/10
Overall: 4 stars

Reading A Passage to India has been a bit like watching the tide come in, on a dark summer night. There is an inevitable slowness to it that builds strongly and beautifully but never (can’t) break out of its own rhythms. And at the end I feel quite washed away by it.

I am speaking in metaphors, but can’t quite stop myself as I only put the book down a few minutes ago. It is a beautiful and powerful book. Just not a ‘loud’ or ‘obvious’ one. The plot is very, very simple; the book is interesting purely because of its characters. They are developed to be thoroughly and completely human. They are flawed, irrational, thoughtful and mean but compassionate and totally a product of their own cultures. Discourse – between Indians and Ango-Englishmen, Indians and Indians, or Englishmen with the Anglo-English – always contains subtext, emotion, and misunderstanding. It’s incredibly frustrating. But all the more ‘real’ for it. I Believe in the book.

First published in 1924, A Passage to India is ranked 25th on the Modern Library’s top 100 books of the 20th Century. And, I agree it should be on that list (though don’t feel particularly entitled to put it in a ranked order). It takes place at about the time it was published in Imperial India. And the book is the story – a study – in how the ruling race and the indigenous one manage to cohabitate a continent in a way that neither fully understands. There is some talk of love, though it isn’t a love story, and politics though it is by no means a polemic. It’s just a story about people – prejudices – and how they clash.

The subtly with which Forster develops the main characters is stunning : aptly named Miss Quested whose own quest causes disaster for all around her, school master Mr Fielding, and ‘Oriental’ Dr Aziz. Forster’s Oriental imbues an Otherness that would likely irk a modern anthropologist, but I think it is more of a trope than a truism. He makes Aziz’s preference towards the emotional and dramatic to be a product of a different human culture, rather than innately irrational and primitive.

It is fair to say that not a huge amount Happens in the book, but that doesn’t really matter. And coming from someone who generally believes that a good book is just a very good story – that’s pretty impressive. Its beauty and slowness and repetition is engrossing. The heat is languid. You just can’t expect that much to happen when it is so hot. And even when it does, there is a distance to it that makes the book have something of a surreal quality. The chant of ‘Esmiss Esmoor’ is still echoing in my brain. I won’t spoil why that’s important, but I will say that the character it refers to clearly my hero of the book. The one who understands it all the best. And it is nice for an old woman to be ‘right’ and pseudo-heroic where others are silly and small and wrong.

Certainly read this book. It isn’t a Wow book, but it is a deep one. I am impressed by it. It also made an impression on me. I also (bizarrely) think reading this first might have made me a bit more compassionate towards some of the characters in Midnight’s Children – though at the same time reiterate to me how much more palatable a book is to me if it takes time to be crafted, controlled, and made human.

11.13.13

by ELG Gray

Gilead

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 8/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
Overall: 3 stars

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson is the warmest-and-fuzziest book I have read thus far in my great book quest. I would not go so far as to say it is Happy, but it is much more heart warming than the previous 8 I have read. The biggest difference is that the narrator of the book is a content, and his contentment sets the tone for the story.

The narrator is a 76-year-old man named John Ames, writing to his 6 year-old son about all the things Ames would like to be able to tell him as an adult, but can’t because of the very great age gap between them. Whilst there is something bittersweet in such an undertaking, Ames is so happy to have a son and a family at all that I was much more impressed with the warmth and love of the endeavor than the morbidity of it.

For all its warmth (perhaps because of it), Gilead is really the ramblings of an old man. It’s a journal. There are no chapters. The style and tone adds charm, but also makes it occasionally tedious. Especially given that the man is a Congregationalist Reverend (whose father and grandfather were also Reverends), prone to philosophical debates and conjectures. Refreshingly he isn’t one to proselytize, but it can get a bit heavy. Several times I had to stop myself from skim reading. Prepare yourself for the inevitable conflict about predestination. He doesn’t like it, either.

So the book is about religion, and love, and parenthood. It is about loss and friendship and family. It tells a story (or set of stories) about a small-town in the Midwest and its history. Gilead, by the way, is the name of the fictional Iowa town. Set between 1880 and 1957, it touches on the events of both World Wars, and recounts a great deal about its Civil War legacy and abolitionist heritage. It’s a nice book, and if nothing else a very interesting chronicle of a life that lived to see huge technical and social change. Plus, you cannot help but to like Reverend Ames, who is clearly a very, very nice man.

What makes it award-winning, I suspect, is that it tackles a really interesting concept: what a parent wants to teach a child. Knowing you are not going to be present for most of your child’s life – what do you say? Are you selfish? Philosophical? Instructional? Supportive? Robinson, I think, does a lovely job of exploring all of the above.

It’s just that Gilead just didn’t wow me. I got through the book pretty quickly, but mostly because I had 6 hours of train-time over the last several days. I liked reading it, but it didn’t really compel me to keep going. I didn’t Need to know. Throughout, the book inspired me, and touched me, but didn’t – quite – move me.

09.29.13

by ELG Gray

The Color Purple

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 8/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
Overall: 4 stars

I finished reading The Color Purple just as I got to the train station at work on a Monday morning. It is a very good thing I didn’t finish 90 seconds later, or I would have ended up somewhere terribly unhelpful. I remember, as I finished, an overwhelming sense of relief. And also of peace.

Celie, the main character, is a black woman in the American South whose story mostly takes part in the early decades of the twentieth century. If you can think of the variety of horrible things that, stereotypically, might happen to a black woman during that time period – they do. Her life is not, objectively, a happy one. And yet, somehow, the author does a stupendous job of documenting the steady transformation of Celie’s life as she finds empowerment and happiness. It is a journey towards (and through?) grace.

The book itself is written in a series of diary entries (well, sort of – they are notes to a higher being) and letters. Mostly from Celie’s perspective. So as a reader, you quickly pick up the nuances of language, pronunciation, and vocab of the poor African Americans in the South. When done well (this is) it is easily to get steeped in the culture of the book without really realizing that the writing is ‘beautiful’ in the traditional sense.

I remember very little about my 10 minute walk from the station to the office that Monday, but I do recall getting to the office and discovering that my fingers were a bit stiff as I had been clenching my hand in a fist for the entire walk. Upon reflection it was very much a triumphant fist-clench. Not an over-the-top-wild-celebration, but more of a pursed lips, elbow-pump, ‘HA.’ The main characters all demonstrate quite a lot of personal strength, growth, and love. So for all of its rather depressing episodes, I will say that it has a relatively happy ending.

It is a relatively short book – so no need to be intimidated by its size. As mentioned, it isn’t all happy but once you know setting (which is pretty well outlined on the back of the book) none of the bad incidents are particularly surprising. As such, it isn’t a big page-turner: you aren’t so sucked in you can’t put it down – but the characters themselves are obviously (given my reaction to the ending) very real and very believable. If nothing else, I wanted to know what happened to them.

I had always meant to read The Color Purple – and I can definitively say I am very pleased I did. And now I can finally allow myself to watch the movie! (Which I’m told is quite good.) Overall it is a beautiful book, which I would recommend to pretty much anyone. There are lessons about love and life, but it is also just a good read, and an eye-opening window into a time in the not-so-distant past. Read it when you are a bit stressed, and you can’t help but think, “if they can overcome those things in life … what on Earth am I so worried about”?