The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
Thirty-one year old Rahel returns to her childhood village in Kerala, India, to an uncertain reunion with her twin brother (whom she hasn't seen for two decades or so), the few remaining relatives, and memories half-buried in river mud.
Like Son of a Witch, this story is told forward and backward in time, and has a similar dreamish quality. In part, this grows from the language: not just the turning of phrases in English, but the interweaving of Malayalam words as well. The dream is lush and muddy, rich and sorrowing, and the story moves not so much towards redemption as towards tragedy--tragedy without understanding, but with all the depth of many generations of family, tradition, and land.
It won the Booker Prize in 1997. Highly recommended.
Links:
#4 for the year
Like Son of a Witch, this story is told forward and backward in time, and has a similar dreamish quality. In part, this grows from the language: not just the turning of phrases in English, but the interweaving of Malayalam words as well. The dream is lush and muddy, rich and sorrowing, and the story moves not so much towards redemption as towards tragedy--tragedy without understanding, but with all the depth of many generations of family, tradition, and land.
It won the Booker Prize in 1997. Highly recommended.
Links:
- Arundhati Roy
- more Booker Prize winners
- Wikipedia's summary of the book
- images of Kerala
- Roy and some controversy
#4 for the year