The God of Small Things
There are many ways how a book can touch one’s life. A plot spun from gossamer and steel; characters that exasperate and beguile; conflict that drives one to weep or rage. The elements of the quintessential Story that leave the reader awake long after the last page has been read.
Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, the novellas of Nick Joaquin, F. Sionil Jose and Greg Brilliantes. These are some of the books that have made me immensely grateful that I can read.
I suffered through the agonies of their protagonists, celebrated their happiness, and despaired over their tragedies. But in my entire history as a reader, there is no other book that has made me feel so mortal, so vulnerable and disassembled as The God of Small Things.
I first read Arundhati Roy’s first novel and Booker Prize-winning work in 1997 when it first came out. Reading it was nothing short of a journey –towards an affirmation of certain truths internal and basic to myself, and the realization that in this life, the precious and fragile things are often crushed under the weight of selfishness, malice and even mere apathy.
The God of Small Things is a graceful and strong commentary regarding the social and political realities of the author’s native India; its history, and the cultural, religious traditions that both shape and maim its people.
I understood more about the caste system reading the novel than all the lectures I’ve heard on it in high school and college. How it divides the nation, how it separates those who love and the ones they choose to love; how it has resulted in the brutal killing of many who spoke out against it and the vicious oppression it brings.
These lessons in history, politics and culture Arundathi delivered (pointedly, painfully) through the careful weaving of the tragedy of the luminous young mother Ammu, her two-egg twins with the single, Siamese soul, eight-year olds Estha and Rahel, and the man they loved, the Untouchable Paravan Velutha.
Ammu is a woman and a daughter in a culture and society where the worth of women and daughters are measured by the monetary value of the dowries their fathers can give for them. Intelligent and strong willed, she is forced to live at the scornful tolerance of her family. She raises her twins by herself, having divorced an alcoholic husband.
It goes against all human understanding as to why barriers have to be formed to separate people from others. The laws of physics, geography and biology are more than enough to create distances between people; but other people still — through specific perverse and self-serving motives - contrived to build more barriers, create more laws that divide and make the distance even harder to breach.
Many philosophers since Plato have interpreted these laws and defined them in terms of religion, nature and race. Some have taken to give categorized them as the boon or bane of the gods or one single God. The German philospher Karl Marx, meanwhile, synthesized these laws for humanity and labeled them as elements of class struggle.
India possesses one of the most influential cultures in the history of civilization.
It would be an understatement to say that I was moved by their story. In truth, after reading it, putting the book down I felt my heart stop and weep. It was painful to read, because it was keenly beautiful, and because the story itself is pain-filled.
Arundhati’s language, the way she used it to evoke thought, image and emotion was already an important discovery for me, myself being a writer. But the ideas she pushed forward – about oneness, justice, the fragility of childhood and the strength of love that transcends class differences – has influenced, continues to influence the way I view and understand people, and how they live and love. #
September 11th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
meron na ba siyang bagong novel?