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What are readers saying about The God of Small Things?
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Mykee's posted a review at 2010-02-06 06:11:02.
(Language: English)
 
“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize is the perfect story which took place in Kerala, India. I wasn’t picking any book just for the sake of the plot. I needed to get a book where it will take me to India itself. And this book, through its pages brings so much color and life to the country as much as it tragically wrote the lives of the people involved. Twins to be exact. Estha and Rahel whose live changes dramtically in one day. A tragic story on how their lives are torn away from them through the slow decline of their family, of a forbidden love. On how they lost their innocence and on the beauty of life at a very young age and on how it shaped and affected them as adults. The novel is once again beautifully written, it gives so much color and life to characters as much as it gives to the plot. The story is unique bringing you back and forth, past to present, connecting each dot to the other. A puzzle full of pickles, of Katakali artists, of a river where readers want to complete eagerly. I end this book review with the first paragraph of the novel where it will take you away to exotic India and bringing you to this tragic story; “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on the bright mangoes in still, dustgreen tress. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruit burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.” M. 
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-10-11 08:57:50.
(Language: English)
There is a big similarity in J M Coetzee's book Disgrace and A Roy's The God of Small things. They both walk you through societal construct focusing on human perceptions about their position in a ladder to better things. Coetzee approaches the story from a race dimension (white and black) while Roy comes from a Caste profiling system (within same race). They both show the dramatic power of "the human mind" to either succumb to oppression or stand up and face their inner demons.The combination of the two books is a rather enriching experience, bad at the same time a sad reminder that humans have a long way to go before they are fully evolved to deserve being called "socially intelligent"!
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-12-15 04:47:23.
(Language: English)
This is a truly unique work of fiction in every sense of the word. The author lights up our imagination by creating a new language with original phrases and expressions. Nevertheless, I had difficulty getting through the book. The style of writing and the fact the the story jumps from present to past frequently was hard to keep up with and it created a barrier for understanding the plot and the characters. At the heart of it, it's a tragic drama about the lives of two-egg twins who were separated due to extraordinary circumstances. The story picks up pace towards the end and is more enjoyable to read when all the pieces of the puzzle come together. I am happy to have read a very different type of book, but I wouldn't read anything else by Roy.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-03-04 10:37:16.
(Language: English)
A tale of terrible beauty that takes you through the small, charming details into the traps of honor in a family, a town, an unforgiving society. “It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali had discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.”
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-11-15 06:29:28.
(Language: English)
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-24 08:32:01.
(Language: English)
I read this book in October 2007. I got it from a friend who couldn't finish it and it's somewhat surprising that I did. I felt at first like Roy's "beautiful language" was more indicative of her screenwriting than ability to evoke emotion, and the nuances of Indian culture made it hard to get into as I had little familiarity with it. I did end up finding it a good book, as the characters were very real and allowed me to experience some of the sadness of the loss of innocence and the reality of segregation and injustice. For me, though, the attempted novelty of shifting back and forth through time made it more difficult for me to engage these things more fully. Maybe I could get more out of a second read, but I am a slow reader and hardly can stick to a book one time through, plus there are many books that I relate more to immediately.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-12-07 09:27:30.
(Language: English)
***SPOILER ALERT***This novel tells us the story of the break-up of a family and the death of a child in 1960s India. Beyond this story we are given a glimpse of the life and social structure of a part of India where Syrian Christians have replaced the upper caste Hindus. The story is centered on a multigenerational upper caste family who now operate a jam factory. They are descended from a minister. His son and daughter feature large in the story - the son is trained as an entomologist and is employed by the government he is a very abusive man and beats his wife and children often. The daughter falls in love with a Roman Catholic priest and thus is well advanced in spinsterhood at the time of the novel she is very disparaging toward her niece. The two children of the abusive entomologist are troubled people. The eldest, a son is a Rhodes scholar and marries while at Oxford. His wife cannot abide him and divorces him shortly after the birth of their daughter Sophie. The daughter marries an alcoholic and gives birth to twins. She also divorces her husband and returns to the family home. The novel centres on a visit by the English ex-wife and daughter and the death of the daughter in the river adjacent to the home. The twins mother tells her children that they are the ruination of her life and so they and Sophie run away on a boat. The boat flips and Sophie drowns - the death is blamed on the lower caste lover of the twins mother. The spinster orchestrates the casting out of the mother and the male twin. The twins are re-united as adults and try to heal each other, the mother dies at 31, the uncle emigrates to Canada.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-05-20 07:15:40.
(Language: English)
This book is a very poetic, powerful account seen through the eyes of the yong twins Estha and Rahel of a wildly dysfunctional Keralite family's personal tragedy catapulted into hideous social injustice.The structure is very original but demands a lot of the reader: it's as if Arundhati Roy wrote the story chronologically on a deck of playing cards, then threw them in the air and constructed the book as she gathered the cards in her hands. I really liked it but would not recommend it to everyone.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-10-04 04:53:40.
(Language: English)
This is a fantastic book which tells you about the life of people of Syrian Christian community who lived in Central Kerala, post-independence. It also gives a picture of the socio-economic situation of kerala . It could be a feminist reading too, but can appeal everybody who prefers good reading. How a deserted mother struggles to bring up her twins and how she tries to love them "double": giving the love of both the parents, and how she is denied of conjugal/or physical needs are the touchy descriptions in the book. The girl child once grew up travels in the path of her mother, abandoned by her husband. You'll really the sorrow of a young lady who is denied of paternal and marital love. Also, it's a great saga of filial relationship too. The love between the two children is unparalleled. This book will touch your heart!
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-11 11:33:45.
(Language: English)
Fresh out of reading French post-structuralist texts with an atheistic fervor to devour this book so highly recommended to me, I spent the entire first chapter trying to pry open her prose, dismissing it in my mind as flowery and overwrought with feelings that weren't there. Gradually, her consistently brilliant prose, with the teeter-totterings of matter-of-factedness, effortless poetic touch and hilarious brusqueness (like "the secret joys of underwater farting" or Ammu's sticking toothbrushes under her breasts) had me completely disarmed and infatuated in Ms. Roy's story. That she has not written a book since is a shame, although she would be hardpressed to outdo her debut. Perhaps if she never writes another novel, Neil Parry's insightful connection to Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird may go even further: each author would have written just one novel, and, in my mind, left us with two of the better novels of the last century. This book is highly recommended. I feel she has a more realistic balance of prose than Salman Rushdie (to whom she has been compared) with the poetic touch reminiscent of Updike and Nabokov. The perspective is reminiscent of Lee & Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes, at least) and other good children's writers from way back in middle school. It's the best all-around book I've read since The Brothers Karamazov at Christmas.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-08-24 02:51:37.
(Language: English)
Arundhati Roy’s novel ‘’The God of Small Things’’which won the Booker award in 1997, is an outstanding novel leading the reader to experience an inner and intimate cross-questioning which results in a bitter annoyance; an onthological discomfort or a strong feeling of otherness. The complexities of hybridity and post-colonial culture have been deconstructed by Roy’s British- Asian intellect which has been shaped by being a daughter of a Hindu and a Syrian and being educated in Anglo –Saxon schools andhaving the feeling of a native of neither Bengali and nor Britain .A co/multi- existence of the old and the new and a hybrid of both; having a paradoxial essence ruining people’s lives is the main theme of the novel having a universal message, coded with ethno-centric letters .Although Roy insists that it’s a novel on the nature of human being not India, India transforms itself from being a country fragmented with contradicting religions, ideologies and colonizers’ cultural and socio-political hegemony to a human being in the characters of Ammu, Estha, mostly Rahel, Baby Kochamma and Lemondrinking Man. More important than that; the novel describes how the cultural coctail that has been prepared to supress the poor, the weak and the alienated for the sake of globalism or civilization sneaks into human beings lives and poisons them. The macro is squeezed within a micro;an upper cast rich family’s daughter Ammu’s love for an Untouchable and a degenerated ‘’cast christians’’, ‘’cast hindus’’, Marxist factory owner, Hindu-Syrian anglophilic family portrait of Rahel and their life path which resembles the river’s in Ayemenem.Roy’s text is reflecting her hybridity as well, she is deploying cultural codes by means of her derivative adjectives such as’’re-returned’’ or ‘’with a sitting down sense’’which are sounding English, but meaning or feeling differently As from the point of reader, the novel is so successfully fictionalized that one is gravitated to the novel that constructs its reality on your mind. You are neither disgusted nor shocked when you read Estha and Rahel’s lovemaking scene. Roy’s theme of love knitted with her own way to somewhere inside of yours, lets you see an incest, from a different perspective. Rahel becomes Ammu and Estha becomes Velutha and sex becomes love.God of Small Things is a purification of the reality and ignition of a poetic insight that even an average reader may have deep down somewhere.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-04-02 08:23:36.
(Language: English)
When I started reading the book, I did not know much about Kerala. It took first two chapters of the book to take my familiarity with Kerala in general and the roles of the book in particular to such a level that I could appreciate what I was reading. Arundhati Roy master of art of story telling. The story she tells is interesting, but more interesting is, the way she tells it. And that is where one becomes compelled to like the book. The core story, as such, is a normal one. May be, better than a normal one, you can say. But she has depicted such small and minute details of life, and has described them throughout the book, that one is amazed at her capability to observe. Most of these things are not described in books because the author as well as the readers, take them to be granted, take them as obvious. But to know how enjoyable it is to have these obvious, small, minute, sometimes insignificant things as part of a book, read this book. This is one of the things that differentiates it from rest of the books. The book is superb if you want to know Kerala, "God's own country" as it is known as in India, a superb place in itself. By the time you finish the book you will know a lot about it, and a lot of new things about it if you already know Kerala. You will know there are rivers flow towards the sea and from the sea depending upon low tide and high tide. You will know how a seven year old feels if she feels another child of her own age is getting more attention at her cost. You will know how a sensible child, in fact very sensible one, will react after hearing from his Mom that he and his twin sister are cause of her problems. The end of the book is tragic one, and it is as realistic as well. Though off course I did not finish it in one go, after starting the book, I never felt like leaving it unfinished. And I read it the second time as well. One will get the pleasure what one expects from reading a nice book, even if one reads it the third ... or say fourth time as well, a the main story is not that great .. but the small things described in the book are, and so is the way they have been described. To sum it up, "This is an ordinary story, told extraordinarily."
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-09-21 03:48:05.
(Language: English)
Set in Kerala, southern India 1969 we are told the story of two fraternal twins Rahel and her brother Estha. They live with their divorced mother Ammu under sufferance in the Ayemenem house with their grandmother, uncle and grand-aunt. The story moves back and forth over time as it builds up a picture of the incidents that decimated the household. The arrival and subsequent accidental death of the twins half cousin Sophie Mol and the ill fated love affair between Ammu and the untouchable paravan Velutha. This is set against a backdrop of local politics where Communism is rattling the age-old caste system, where there are social taboos and laws that lay down who should be loved by who. And how. And how much In the midst of the family we have the God of small things, the God of loss. The God who could only do one thing for “if he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win†This singular god in a land of many gods presides over all, seemingly unwilling or unable to stop suffering, he too is shackled by the gift he gives, the gift that reaches down and says I will let you choose. For me this book is about choice, the God given right to decide the path we travel, the small everyday decisions we make that form both the people we are and decide the things that happen to us. Sometimes these choices are blind or greatly limited by the choices that others make. The God of small things is like a raindrop on a window pane making twisted turns as it travels downward, the path is unpredictable as the drop zig zags across the glass, it may join with other drops or be blown by the wind but it is forced to choose a path as it travels downward. The God of loss is an acknowledgment that each choice is a decision not to take other roads, the decision recorded in history is finite amidst a myriad of possibilities. Although any onlooker can tell where the raindrop is now, it is only those who diligently watch that can tell the course it traveled. The God of Small things is about a world where things went wrong, where “wrong†choices were made and in that way it is a book that speaks a truth about humankind. Those choices made in lust or love, in kindness or envy, in hope or despair, meld into a devastating cocktail that rips apart the lives of the guilty and the innocent. It seems that as each of the characters lives trickle down the windowpane of life they struggle to avoid their destiny. This is a bleak picture with little comfort, yet in this darkness there is a ray of hope. The final words in the book recalls the only promise that Ammu made to her lover and he to her - “tomorrow? tomorrow†first with a question mark then with more confidence, they knew that things could change in a day but refused to give up hope, the hope of tomorrow.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-09-10 08:42:28.
(Language: English)
I should abstain from giving this book a rating because the book will evoke two extreme reactions from two types of readers. Namely, those who love straight forward, event laced novels and those who love experimental prose bordering the boundaries of hallucination. However, as a literary work, it is definitely a must read. Also, I must warn the reader that this book is difficult to comprehend as the story shuffles between various time spans thereby making the narrative like a puzzle. Roy also uses unusual sentence structures, awkward phrases and childish banter that can be equally amusing as well as distracting. The heart of the story is two dizygotic (two-egged, dissimilar) twins - Estha (boy, the one with hair shaped like an Elvis puff) and Rahel (girl, the one whose hair looks like a fountain in Love-in-Tokyo rubber band). The tragic story deals with their loss of childhood, how their and their mother's life changed in a single day. How they had to face two deaths and a separation in a Kerala crippled by caste system and dual-standard communists. Many readers will actually dump this book once they have read just two chapters, but have patience and you might be rewarded. It took me about two weeks to finish the book - long by any standards and definitely long by it's size of just 340 pages.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-15 11:04:40.
(Language: English)
The language can be a bit over-the-top at times, trying too hard to catch your attention with random capitalization and the constant use of invented compound words like soapslippery. I don't mind these things in moderation, but after a time they become too obvious of devices and at their worst times seem inserted not for the sense they make but rather their supposed poetic weight. Luckily, the beauty and richness of the story makes up for the sometimes overbearing language, and at times the language stands on its own as truly beautiful without being demanding. Roy also does a brilliant job capturing the mindset of children and seamlessly weaving it into her already lively prose. The story itself is woven into a slowly crushing, beautiful pattern of repeating phrases like omens to the sadness to come.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-11-12 09:25:23.
(Language: English)
The storyline is pretty poignant, but the overall it's effect is marred by the author's writing style - a kind of 'wannabe' approach. It can be observed that the author's true objective in writing this book might not have been to write something brilliant, but to write in a way that others might want to follow. Language and word-usage (or should I say, 'word-synthesis) is completely off-track; which, in a way, divert the reader's concentration towards the nitty-gritties of the author's vocabulary when it should have actually inspired him/her to realise the brilliance of the plot. Introductions are too many and too long, apart from being poorly organized. After reading the whole book, one can still not be sure if he/she has figured out even one character completely. While some might want to say that this actually reflects the true nature of life, in general, and humans, in particular; but it isn't really enjoyable in a novel. Overall - 4/10
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-03-21 03:27:51.
(Language: English)
At 321 pages this book took me a whole week to read when it should have only been a night. I could only bring myself to read a chapter at a time it was so tedious to get through. It takes a brother and sister, twins, and jumps back and forth through their life. Sometimes it veers into a little background of the side characters but overall it is about Rahel and her brother Estha. When they are younger the tale is about the visit of their cousin Sophie Mol and her subsequent death. So much of the book is leading up to her death that when it finally happens it is really quite anticlimactic and doesn't even grace a full page of the book. On the other side, one of the un-touchables frequently mentioned in the book has his beating and death graphically described for some time and the sex scene between him and the twin's mother is almost the whole chapter of the last book. Neither of which alludes to the rest of the story as a whole. While Roy is lauded for her writing, I found that she used a few brilliant "literary" phrases; over and over and over and over. To the point where I kept feeling like I was reading the same chapter again and again. If I never hear or see the words "Puff" and "Two-egg Twins" again I will be exceedingly happy, as she seemed to use them on almost every page. As far as the plot of the book I felt that the characters were uninteresting or connect-able. It felt like you kept reading to go nowhere in the story. Overall I just didn't like the book. I know that many people do but my thought is that just because it is an important social issue, it doesn't make the book worth reading. Those social issues could be better explored through better writing.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-03-03 02:30:34.
(Language: English)
This highly stylized novel tells the story of one very fractured family from the southernmost tip of India. Here is an unhappy family unhappy in its own way, and through flashbacks and flashforwards The God of Small Things unfolds the secrets of these characters' unhappiness. First-time novelist Arundhati Roy twists and reshapes language to create an arresting, startling sort of precision. The average reader of mainstream fiction may have a tough time working through Roy's prose, but those with a more literary bent to their usual fiction inclinations should find the initial struggle through the dense prose a worthy price for this lushly tragic tale.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-30 01:39:48.
(Language: English)
This reminded me vaguely of a cheaper version of Atonement. The cause-effect relationship is pretty similar, the intricacy was there… But there were huge differences in tactics that made this the lesser of the two. First of all, this thing had too many characters. We didn’t need to know about Baba or Father Mulligan or Kari Saipu or Rahel’s ex-husband or any number of these expository characters. They’re interesting, to be sure, but most of them don’t serve a function in the fruition of the book. That having been said, Roy knows how to build a character. Most of these people were incredibly vivid and lifelike. Baby Kochamma is impossibly evil. But I think Roy’s undoing is her tendency to overshoot herself, in both language and story. Her prose is beautiful, but sometimes she just pushes a little too far, turning richness of language into syrupy melodrama. And I personally found the entire last chapter with Ammu and Velutha to be completely unnecessary. The book should have stopped as the train pulled away. It’s like watching Revenge of the Sith and wishing like hell the movie would have rolled credits just as the Vader mask comes down on Anakin. And then there’s five more minutes of movie.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-10-16 08:57:21.
(Language: English)
entsFriday, October 16, 2009 The Good of Small Things If reading is the bread for the soul, then this book is its best bakery. "They broke the love laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much" she writes. I wasn't reading a book, I was rather remembering. The wordplay Arundhathi Roy often used in the book very cleverly narrated through the eyes and mind of a child, or more specifically the twin souls Rahel and Estha, awoke the child in me. I was dazzled by her ability to still remember and tell a story with the same feelings of a kid without losing the poetic touch. A breathtaking story beautifully told in the sad and happy parts. Once again, one of those books that make you understand the complications of the human nature and reminds you of how cruel the human can be and how soft his soul.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-07-07 04:31:23.
(Language: English)
Arundhati Roy's style for a first time writer is whimsically descriptive, lyrical and lush hides a sweet sharp blade. Her characters--human, real, flesh and blood like you and like me. Ammu, Chacko, Baby Kotchamma, Mammachi, Pappachi, Estha, Rahel: all are reflections of our own families. The structure of the plot bewitches and bewilders--like a Tarantino film, flashbacks within flashbacks, mesmerizing and paralyzing all sense of time till there is no sense of time and THAT'S when you find yourself at the end of the book, beaten, bloody and aching for more--knowing that there can never be more. The God of Small Things leaves a deep pain in your heart, makes you reflect on your own relationships with your loved ones, makes you question your life and the way you're living it. -- it is heartbreakingly beautiful
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-28 04:34:36.
(Language: English)
This is one of those books that, in my opinion, would have been more successful as a short story. The beautiful prose is, of course, beautiful and staggeringly intelligent, but it gets sluggish and repetitive after a while. By the last 50 pages or so, I struggled to go on...by the last 20, I literally threw the book at a wall and refused to read the rest (that and I wanted to stab the character Baby Kochamma.) Furthermore, the climax is drawn out to the point of exhaustion, especially since you know what it's going to be WAY before it actually happens. It's nice that Roy didn't use a typical timeline, but as a result she frustrates the reader. Criticisms aside, The God of Small Things is a story that unabashedly reveals the ugliest sides of human nature, tradition, and religion. It also has strong feminist undertones, especially in underlining the true fears of men with power (women, the uprising of the repressed, the deterioration of class boundaries.)
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-09-30 02:26:40.
(Language: English)
Beautiful, such an amazing book! Arundhati Roy describes things so sweetly - one of my favourite parts of the book is where Baby Kochamma and Ammu are helping Rahel go to the toilet in the cinema (bringing back funny memories of my own experiences with squat toilets in India!). She makes the most ordinary mundane situations damn hilarious! It's a sad story but it illustrates really well the way in which politics and social norms (by way of the rigid caste system) spill over into people's everyday lives in India and in particular, dictate whom a person can and cannot love. Roy is a fantastic writer, and she is great to listen to in interview as she speaks with the same eloquent language that she writes in. I'm aware that I rave about a lot of books but this is definitely one of my favourites.
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Stan posted a review at 2008-10-19 08:19:58.
(Language: English)
To date, this is the author's only completed novel. Much of the story evolves around the childhood experiences of fraternal twins who are separated when very young and do not become reunited until adulthood. The basic theme of the book is how small things in life affect people's behavior and their lives. Most of the story takes place in a town in Kerala state of south India. Several aspects of Kerala state are explored in detail: the Communist party, which ruled the region for many years, the caste system and the status of untouchables, and the Keralite Syrian Christian community, who makes up as much as 20% of the state's population. As such, reading this book can be taken as a journey to an exotic unknown region of the world. The book is written in a unique narrative style, inventing its own language in some place with occasional passages sprinkled with phrases from the Malayalam language I think this can be a demanding book that requires a quiet open mood for digesting its contents, but it does has the merit of introducing the reader to facets of south Indian culture unknown elsewhere. The book also has its own share of drama, tragedy, and sexual intrigue to make for interesting reading. The author is known to be active in a number of political caues (environmentalism, anti-war movements, etc.) although I don't see that reflected in her writing here.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-23 03:09:39.
(Language: English)
FAVORITE BOOK EVER. Arundhati Roy creates her own lingual framework by inventing a stylized system of signs and signifiers to enrich the subtext through repetition, capitalization, and italicization. Using these typographical strategies, Roy provides background for specific phrases and names, repeating each to reveal and reinforce meaning. In this way, the narrative arc is retraced through multiple lenses, each from a varied temporal perspective. This cyclical retelling of singular events thereby scaffolds connotations for the reader as reconstituted moments are intentionally underscored. As readers, we are visually cued in to each character’s analyses of these pivotal moments and therefore reexamine our own understanding of their significance. The ease of tracking these denotative touchstones throughout the text provides insight to the reader and proffers an opportunity to see each character, event, and theme informed by previous knowledge. As each seminal experience is recreated and deepened across the trajectory, its capitalized or italicized shape becomes a progressively integral part of the story within a pattern the reader now understands. Variations in the typeface flag distinctions Estha and Rahel, “two-egg twins,†have established between reality and their play language of survival in changing contexts. The twins negotiate their individuality through learned principles and repeat discoveries to themselves, storing each to memory as a reference for contextualizing future events. Together, the twins name and categorize emotions through capitalization and form an internal inventory reflective of both their actual and imagined environments. By altering a word or phrase, they are experimenting with their capacity to name and thereby understand the object or the experience. This regulated process fosters self-definition in terms of truths they have encountered. From two memory pools, the story is revealed to the reader, displaying smooth and meaningful transitions between these realities. Through this dual framing of the plot, the novel maps the twins’ memories and employs textual aesthetics to imbue meaning. Specific objects are characterized through capitalization, such as an “Elvis Presley Puff,†or a “Love-in-Tokyo.†These items represent pride for Estha and Rahel, signifying their very best accessories, which are intended to gain them favor when meeting their English cousin, Sophie Mol, at the airport. Once named, any capitalized title connotes a concept that has been essentialized over time to mark the distinction between playful and purposeful language. At times, more significant events are memorialized through titling. “Death by Drowning†refers to Sophie Mol’s death in a very technical sense. After overhearing it, the twins repeat this title in their heads when emotionally processing the event and come to describe their cousin’s status in death, and later Velutha’s and Ammu’s, as “Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.†Through such detached phrasing, Estha and Rahel center tragedy within their personalized construct for viewing the world and distance themselves from its implications. Capitalization in The God of Small Things is also used to symbolize a character’s perspective of their experience, as well as various motifs from the novel. The twins’ primary search for definition surrounds Sophie Mol’s drowning and their mother’s affair with Velutha, an Untouchable. Estha and Rahel are plagued with guilt when reflecting upon the connection between these events, as they played with Velutha at the river where Sophie Mol drowned, also the site for Velutha and Ammu’s clandestine escapes. Each capitalized phrase categorizes notions into concrete and non-concrete. Though these titles may be integrated into other scenes, “The Air†continually represents Ammu and Velutha’s final moments together, implying a sense of impending doom. “Love Laws,†when capitalized, not only refer to the caste system that separates them into Touchable and Untouchable, but also represent an essential truth and “lay down who can love. And how. And how much.†Italicization in The God of Small Things both literally and figuratively italicizes learned definitions, answers, understandings, and names, implying ideas that the reader should note for the future. Through capitalization and italicization, we observe psychological impressions on Ammu, Velutha, and the twins. Estha and Rahel’s forced, “mature†rationalization is echoed through certain phrases, such as “Anything can happen to Anyone,†which describes the horrific events in the novel and emphasizes that Velutha, although not deemed “anyone†as a lower caste Paravan, is someone very significant to Estha, Rahel, and Ammu. Such a lingual framework procures a textual underbelly ridden with lines of race and culture. By mid-novel, the graphic design of the language underpins the story semantically, and race is thus italicized throughout the structure. Rahel states to her mother, “We be of one blood, Thou and I,†which is immediately followed by Ammu’s reluctance “to return to the dinner table, where the conversation circled like a moth around the white child and her mother as though they were the only source of light.†The “white child,†Sophie Mol, is described as “Hatted, bell-bottomed, and Loved from the Beginning†throughout the book, further highlighting the racial divide between the twins and their English cousin. Culture is also expressed in the architecture of the novel, often through Mammachi, Ammu’s mother. She cannot separate the notion of her daughter’s love for an Untouchable from a conservative ideology so fundamentally informed by Indian politics. Views of intimacy are subsequently capitalized and categorized: Sex from Love,†and “Needs from Feelings.†This reinforces the distinction between what is impersonal and what is human; the latter of both pairs being ideas unacknowledged by those that would punish any intermingling of an upper caste with an Untouchable. Larger thematic implications in the novel are signified by the lingual structure and signifiers embedded in the shape of the language itself. As letters are enlarged or slanted, meaning is flagged and construed. Readers begin to follow these textual emblems provided by Roy’s experimental lexis. Overarching issues are expressed through language and structure alone, without the aid of plot or dialogue. Within The God of Small Things, the reader is acquainted with a typographical commentary of sorts, and can make a fluid transition from classic criticism to language analysis when prompting a rich literary dialogue.
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