Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, The God Of Small Things is a book that has been hanging around on the bookshelf at home for some time. After picking it up and putting it back on the shelf a few times, I decided it was finally time to read it. I found this a difficult book to get into, with much flipping backward and forward in time, which, combined with unusual (to me) names and lots of internalising by the main characters, left me feeling a tad confused and nonplussed. Set in Kerala, this is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins who are growing up in the midst of familial and political turbulence. There is a constant feeling of unease within what appears, from the outside, to be very strict rules about how one should live, and who one should love. There are beautiful passages which transport you into an almost ethereal world, followed by harrowing passages of abuse and violence that bring you right back down to earth with a bump. It is all very unsettling, and I found there to be a distinct lack of happiness within any of the characters, which left me feeling glum. There were tiny, desperate glimpses of love, which provided a little hope and brightness, but these were quickly snatched away again. I think I found this a challenging book because of the subject matter, but also, it wasn't until I "got a good run" at the book one morning where I read for at least an hour, that it started to make a bit more sense and I warmed to it. I kind of wish I'd done that from the start - with books of this ilk, I must make a more concerted effort to do so. The quality of the writing by author Arundhati Roy is not in doubt, particularly in the last third of the book, but I found the story just too sad for my own personal taste. Time for something a little lighter maybe?
My STAR rating: FOUR.
Length: 340 print pages
Price I paid: free, borrowed from my husband.
Formats available: print, unabridged audio download, unabridged audio cassette, ebook.
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