As interesting as Midnight’s Children was, the writing style got in the way of my being able to enjoy the story, and it made me apprehensive starting another book by an Indian author. Until I read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie earlier this year I had never read a book by an Indian author before. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that’s completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things explores the tragic fate of a family which “tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.” They are an eclectic mix: grandmother Mammachi her spoilt Anglophile son, Chacko her daughter Ammu Ammu’s inseparable twins Estha and Rahel and Baby Kochamma, grand-aunt, determined to spread the bitter seeds of her early disappointment in love. In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation.
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