Arundhati Roy: "God of Small Things"

Stories are being told, because among people there is always an unquenchable thirst for more and more human experience.

It may be the bed time story that you would have heard as a child, or a story that your teacher told during moral science class, or as a good morning thought, or a cover story in a magazine, or a gossip story about a film star, or a story about some incident that happened to somebody, or watching a story being enacted in silver screen or small screen, the fact remains undeniable that we all are drawn towards some kind of human experience apart from our own lives in the form of a story.

This sort of experience is something that every story promises, but only a few satisfy. One among of few such stories is, ‘The God Of Small Things’ . I was lucky that I came across this book and I love it not for the story, but the way the story was been told.

It was this book that made me fall in love with words. A proof of how a small sentence made with the right words can have a unique meaning that resonate weird feelings, beyond other forms of expression.

Reading this book was like following someone’s train of thoughts, going forward and backwards, like going inside someone’s mind, like living someone’s memories and like seeing things in the same someone’s point of view, while comparing this with that.

Arundati Roy’s masterpiece has a slight biography like touch. She is surely a very gifted writer. Her style of writing is unique. But what she writes is like a vomit of words. Yeah! Vomit; though not disgusting. For it follows absolutely no rules of story telling. On the contrary it is filled with unexpected similes and sudden short funny sentences.

It was one of sincerest book I have ever read. Judging by the style, I was sure that it was the unedited first attempt. For, though the book is wonderful, it is also an unorganized sequence of words. And I was right. She did say that in an interview.

This book had originated from sudden flow of ideas that came in to Ms. Roy’s head from nowhere, that she felt the sudden passionate urge to regurgitate it all on paper through ink. Just that! Unedited.

Someone who considers books only as a source of entertainment and want to read only for passing time may not be able to appreciate this book’s unique splendor.

Such people may find the words pointless and the story going no where. They might even wonder how this book won the Booker prize. (I wasn’t surprised to find a couple of negative reviews on this book.)

But for me, this book is a treasure, for it satisfies my need to read a story that would, in some sense, matter. It is this book that I take up before cuddling in my bed everyday. As I read it and re-read it, I find myself falling more and more in love, with the words and the emotion behind it.

To describe it using Ms. Roy’s words, I should say that this book was ‘sick sweet’. No wonder the book won rare honors to Ms. Roy. Moreover it is a source of inspiration for people like me whose life ambition is to write a book.

Hope, someday I will write a book, and win a Booker prize for it :)


*Suzanna Arundhati Roy[1] (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, writer and activist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, and, in 2002, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/God_Of_Small_Things___The_-_Arundhati_Roy-87102-1.html