Arundhati Roy

Here is book review number 2.

So I finished Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things a while ago during the exams. But I shall write on it nonetheless since I have nothing very important to do.

I usually tend to avoid these Indian writers because most of the time, I feel they're playing up too much on the Orientalist notion - being the educated ethnic who can speak for the voice of the oppressed and underprivleged etcetera. I mean that kind of thing might be very appealing to ignorant Westerners who are horrified at idea of female subjugation and can never imagine, for the life of them, how women can Ever be treated as anything less than equal to men. But, coming from Asia and being very Asian, it's all nothing new to me - from the sweltering sun these writers so oft' describe as an unmerciful beating heat, to the colourful tapestry of cloths women in this region adorn, to the oppression of women and caste systems and the list threads on and on and on..- it all just doesn't enthrall me in the way it would a Westerner. Arundhati Roy sort of mimicks that notion quite a bit but at least she does it in subtle ways so it's not so glaring and obvious and annoying.

The first thing I noticed about Roy was her striking semblance in writing style to Salman Rushdie. And that, I don't quite like.

But what I did like about her book was her outright defiance of the caste system of India as played out through Ammu and Velutha (the untouchable). The two had a wretched affair in the steal of the night by the bushes. Haha. And she described the details of their affair so lasciviously and with such crude explicit detail (well it wouldn't be that crude except for the fact that he was an untouchable and she, of a higher caste), that it made it seem so passionately rebellious. She really made the reader indulge in the defiance, the social and political furore, the unconvention and the wrongness of it all, surreptitiously, as Velutha and Ammu relished one another in the dark. It was nice, secret, private and burning with all sorts of dissention all in one.

I was also very intrigued by the discovery of the details of the lives of the untouchables. She mentioned somewhere in the book that at a time where caste discrimination was so bad,the untouchables actually had to walk backwards with a broom to cover up their steps. I'm not sure if that's entirely true but my goodness! How interesting.

Lastly, what I thought gave the book a tinge of sad, melancholic air was the narration that took the form of the thoughts of the two fraternal twins, Esthappen and Rahel. They gave the book that child-like innocence and expressed the simplistic and yet highly emotive ways of children which served as a good form of communication with the reader. You often feel sad when you read of their experiences with an adult view and hear them lament within the purview of their small children minds. You can almost sense the deep trauma Estha experiences when he is molested by the Orangedrink Lemondrink man at the theatre. I liked it best when that trauma was not overtly described through adult eyes but was described through the unexplinable, inarticulate woes of a child who doesn't understand what's happening to him but can only feel a deep sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Roy follows through very well with the idea of continuation in her characters because Estha continually remembers the Orangedrink Lemondrink man and constantly relates the same feeling in hsi stomach to that incident. He also tries as best as he can, to bury it so he no longer has to face up to it. Very reminiscent of real childish thoughts - still innocent, hopeful, optimistic and unknowing.

I really enjoyed this read. Go get your book!