From the cover (or a review):
Arundhati Roy is not simply a good writer (there are arguably many of those), she is a spiritual genius. This book lay on my bookshelf for two years gathering dust before I ever picked it up- fool that I am! I am a high school English teacher and generally do a lot of reading, but The God Of Small Things made me stop dead in my tracks; stop in the way one stops when told a truth he has known in his heart all along but has never been articulate, brave, or present enough to say or really "know"; stop like a bus stops, or like we fall in love; suddenly and without grace. You finally have to say after reading this book, "so this is the way things really are," not because Roy tries to convince you, but because you can so clearly "see" it. She paints these lives so rawly, without pretense or preachiness. This book is much, much more than its stunning metaphors, or its language(though beautiful), or its characters-Arundhati says something definitive about the world in which we live and with astoundingly perceptive insight and painful honesty, breaks your heart because her story is about the way you too have lived your life, loving some and not others and "seeing" some and not others. Haven't we all? Characters like Sophie Mol, dead in a box, "bell bottoms and all" who was "Lovedfromthebeginning" and Esta who "just kept on walking," make us see the terrible power of love and of lovelessness over our lives. One of the most poignant scenes for me was one in which relations from the Indian village in which the novel is set wait all day at a humid airport in their best clothes for foreign relatives who will never love them. The subtlety of Roy's depiction of deeply held emotional apartheid within families will haunt you.
This book is of first rate literary merit, but better than that, it is a yoga class, therapist, insight meditation, poem, lover, friend and philosopher in one. It will hit you all at once after about 100 pages and stay with you for years. It will remind you of who you are or even, who you should be. Roy's story for me has been freedom from illusion and the awful oppression of the " crawling backward days." Who was I before I read this book? I owe this review to Roy and to the world-maybe I can thank her someday. Whatever you do, READ IT!


CHAPTER 1

PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebotdes hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. B...

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