You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
booksholdmylifetogether 's review for:
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
From the first page, I knew I loved this book.
"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month" The two paragraphs that follow are filled with words that match the tempo: long, humid, gorge, hum, fatly, sloth, sullen. Then, in P3, the monsoon breaks, and we feast on mossgreen, glittering, root, bloom, burst, snake.
I was surprised that I liked the repetition in this book. Usually, I am skeptical when I see an author experimenting with prose and using grammar The Wrong Way(!), however, I felt that Roy never used errant capitalizations or nicknames(Ambassador) or extended metaphors (Little Man, Big Man) or misspellings(Afternoon Gnap) to substitute for absent detail, but rather to underscore the feelings of confusion and innocence in our young characters. Even things that didn't necessarily supplement the plot in their repition, such as the Hole in the Universe and the fountain in a Love-In-Tokyo establish a sense of familiarity in the story that is both not overdone and serves to add continuity and rhythm to a story structured by flashbacks.
Although I've marked it as five stars, I wouldn't say that this book is perfect. Structurally, I've never been a fan of obvious and recurrent foreshadowing. We were promised a horrible event(admittedly, that we did receive), but the continuous looming threat cheapens the raw emotions of the characters.
TLDR: Arundhati Roy is an icon in so many ways.
"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month" The two paragraphs that follow are filled with words that match the tempo: long, humid, gorge, hum, fatly, sloth, sullen. Then, in P3, the monsoon breaks, and we feast on mossgreen, glittering, root, bloom, burst, snake.
I was surprised that I liked the repetition in this book. Usually, I am skeptical when I see an author experimenting with prose and using grammar The Wrong Way(!), however, I felt that Roy never used errant capitalizations or nicknames(Ambassador) or extended metaphors (Little Man, Big Man) or misspellings(Afternoon Gnap) to substitute for absent detail, but rather to underscore the feelings of confusion and innocence in our young characters. Even things that didn't necessarily supplement the plot in their repition, such as the Hole in the Universe and the fountain in a Love-In-Tokyo establish a sense of familiarity in the story that is both not overdone and serves to add continuity and rhythm to a story structured by flashbacks.
Although I've marked it as five stars, I wouldn't say that this book is perfect. Structurally, I've never been a fan of obvious and recurrent foreshadowing. We were promised a horrible event(admittedly, that we did receive), but the continuous looming threat cheapens the raw emotions of the characters.
TLDR: Arundhati Roy is an icon in so many ways.