Dodgy At Best

The God Of Small Things

// March 4th, 2010 // Daily Jots

In a further effort to regain my lost intelligence, not only have I started getting up to speed on all the movies I have missed the past couple years, but I’ve also been tearing through books as quickly as I can get my hands on them. When I was down in Dallas we made a trip to Half Price Books, or something like that, where I found delightful things for under $5. I picked up a couple of Booker Prize winners, a glorious Woolf, and Love in the Time of Cholera. I have to ask…is being from India a requirement for Booker Prize victory? Because although I grabbed the two books because I recognized the titles and they had the big BP endorsement, they also shared a common thread in that the authors are, and the books are set in, India.

That was pretty much where the similarities ended mind you. White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008 winner) was crude, vulgar and a somewhat obscene look into the development of an industrialized nation from the tech heaven of Bangalore to the vast “Darkness” of back woods India. Although I could appreciate its merit and read it start to finish in a very short time, I felt that stylistically sometimes it was trying too hard to maintain a casual, blasé matter-of-factness in the face of illegal/abhorrent acts. It certainly didn’t have the sort of captivating grip of The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997 winner), which I read directly before it. I’ve wanted to read this book for years, and finding it in a bargain bin at a random Texan bookstore was one of the more satisfying buys ever. Not because it was cheap, but because it was a steal! What a fantastic, fantastic story. Violence, love, segregation, understanding, jealousy, opportunism, religious persecution, family ties, etc etc; it was told in a beautifully descriptive, almost lyrical style that for once (halleluiah) did not edge into overkill but served to illustrate the story with a skill and precise flow that suited the content.

Easily one of my favourite books that I’ve read in the past few years. Easily.