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Scent of a Dry Lotus
Arundathi roy’s ‘God of small things’
There are great books which you do not like. There are ones which you like and love and show you your world, and still need not be great. When you flip through the pages you start living somewhere else. Where you are not supposed to live. You start knowing the worst secrets of others which you ought not to know. Like dripping water out of a leaky pipe some one’s tears trickle into your eyes. Someone’s kiss may wet your lips. Somewhere between the pages you see yourself sitting there and smiling back at you. When you finish reading the book’s last page, the book actually begins. Somewhere when you are buying a railway ticket or when you are drinking water after walking in hot sun, or when you are not sure how to react to the sudden death of your old school friend or your daughter’s love, the book unfolds.
‘God of small things’ unfolded when I saw penguin shaped dust bins in my school (They always eat garbage with their big rusty beaks). Ammu died with the moth inside her when I was sitting along with my loneliness between the faded yellow walls of the Rasipuram lodge. The oil soaked paper smell of paradise pickle labels is still there in our kitchen’s Ruchi lime pickle’s red label. The novel dissected my life into slices of time and embedded its eyes everywhere in it. A good book like a cockroach hides somewhere in the dark holes but comes out and crawl around everywhere in the dark when you switch of your lights for your dreams. God of Small things did that to me and hence it’s a good book.
The novel’s pattern is like that of a fly in a sweet shop, not sitting quietly anywhere but moving greedily and restlessly between various moments. At the end the circle closes with a love that happens as it has to happen and yes, the ripples the love creates, slowly travels in the river (with its dry lotuses and dead fishes) like a leaf witnessing the changes-huge changes (and not so huge changes) and small changes (and not so small changes).
The novel surely is not a great novel. It cheats us carefully. But I liked the way it cheated me. It cheated me with words. I love to get cheated like that. It never wanted me to look into serious things seriously and easier things easily. I loved it.
In one kamalahassan movie (pesum padam), the hero (or protagonist or call him whatever) beautifully packs with gift wrapper a guy’s shit and disposes it. When I first read God of Small things I felt it said beautifully that life smells shit.
You Said it...
. But Ms. Roy's shape-shifting narrative is also tremendously nourishing, crammed not only with remonstrances but also with inside jokes, metaphors, rogue capital letters, nonsense rhymes and unexpected elaborations. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25truaxt.html
the bottom line is that one is left largely unmoved by the tragedy that unfolds. But perhaps that doesn't matter and the style's the thing. http://www.indiastar.com/roy.htm
The story circles around its core like a ball in a rigged roulette wheel. Hypnotic, repetitive. Finding its centre only at the end, completing a pattern that never had anything to do with chance. Originally published in Aaj Magazine , January/February, 1998.Reviewed by Michael Brockingtonhttp://www.sfu.ca/~brocking/writing/smallgod2.html
Still, a unique voice and a twisty language is not enough on its own to make me enjoy a book - they have to be have a worthwhile story to hang on, a structure to decorate and make beautiful. When it’s the other way around, when the language seems to be primary and the plot secondary,http://fyreflybooks.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/arundhati-roy-the-god-of-small-things/
one more example of William Faulkner's powerful influence upon Third World writers, his method of torturing a story, mangling it, coming at it roundabout after pretentious detours and delays.
(The New Yorker 159)http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=72
There are great books which you do not like. There are ones which you like and love and show you your world, and still need not be great. When you flip through the pages you start living somewhere else. Where you are not supposed to live. You start knowing the worst secrets of others which you ought not to know. Like dripping water out of a leaky pipe some one’s tears trickle into your eyes. Someone’s kiss may wet your lips. Somewhere between the pages you see yourself sitting there and smiling back at you. When you finish reading the book’s last page, the book actually begins. Somewhere when you are buying a railway ticket or when you are drinking water after walking in hot sun, or when you are not sure how to react to the sudden death of your old school friend or your daughter’s love, the book unfolds.
‘God of small things’ unfolded when I saw penguin shaped dust bins in my school (They always eat garbage with their big rusty beaks). Ammu died with the moth inside her when I was sitting along with my loneliness between the faded yellow walls of the Rasipuram lodge. The oil soaked paper smell of paradise pickle labels is still there in our kitchen’s Ruchi lime pickle’s red label. The novel dissected my life into slices of time and embedded its eyes everywhere in it. A good book like a cockroach hides somewhere in the dark holes but comes out and crawl around everywhere in the dark when you switch of your lights for your dreams. God of Small things did that to me and hence it’s a good book.
The novel’s pattern is like that of a fly in a sweet shop, not sitting quietly anywhere but moving greedily and restlessly between various moments. At the end the circle closes with a love that happens as it has to happen and yes, the ripples the love creates, slowly travels in the river (with its dry lotuses and dead fishes) like a leaf witnessing the changes-huge changes (and not so huge changes) and small changes (and not so small changes).
The novel surely is not a great novel. It cheats us carefully. But I liked the way it cheated me. It cheated me with words. I love to get cheated like that. It never wanted me to look into serious things seriously and easier things easily. I loved it.
In one kamalahassan movie (pesum padam), the hero (or protagonist or call him whatever) beautifully packs with gift wrapper a guy’s shit and disposes it. When I first read God of Small things I felt it said beautifully that life smells shit.
You Said it...
. But Ms. Roy's shape-shifting narrative is also tremendously nourishing, crammed not only with remonstrances but also with inside jokes, metaphors, rogue capital letters, nonsense rhymes and unexpected elaborations. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25truaxt.html
the bottom line is that one is left largely unmoved by the tragedy that unfolds. But perhaps that doesn't matter and the style's the thing. http://www.indiastar.com/roy.htm
The story circles around its core like a ball in a rigged roulette wheel. Hypnotic, repetitive. Finding its centre only at the end, completing a pattern that never had anything to do with chance. Originally published in Aaj Magazine , January/February, 1998.Reviewed by Michael Brockingtonhttp://www.sfu.ca/~brocking/writing/smallgod2.html
Still, a unique voice and a twisty language is not enough on its own to make me enjoy a book - they have to be have a worthwhile story to hang on, a structure to decorate and make beautiful. When it’s the other way around, when the language seems to be primary and the plot secondary,http://fyreflybooks.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/arundhati-roy-the-god-of-small-things/
one more example of William Faulkner's powerful influence upon Third World writers, his method of torturing a story, mangling it, coming at it roundabout after pretentious detours and delays.
(The New Yorker 159)http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=72
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