alexisrt 's review for:

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

4.0

---

Arundhati Roy has said she's a storyteller, and that she rarely edits her works. She's accurate in her self assessment--she's a wonderful storyteller, and her work is visibly unedited. There's a lot of wonderful material in here, especially the beginning sections. The problems with the book are twofold: the sections are not knitted together evenly. Her initial idea of how to divide the sections, by switching to Tilo's story once she appears with the baby, makes sense in theory but in practice, it's clunky. I enjoyed most of the politics in the novel--as much of it is cynical asides as dogmatic fury--but they overwhelm the section with Tilo and Musa. This is in part because Tilo's characterization is flawed: she's a kind of irresistible enigma whom we don't get to know very well internally. Her biography is too similar to that of Roy herself and of Rahel from The God of Small Things. The ending, also, is weak. It ties things up, but almost too neatly.

It should probably be about 3.5, for those of you who like these things quantified.