Upon finishing Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, my response can best be described as stunned. This book is so tragic and so beautiful at the same time that I couldn't do anything besides turn the last page and just sit there. I'm honestly not even sure how I can sum it up now. It's basically the story of one day in the life of an Indian family caught up in domestic disputes, classism, and the Communist Revolution. All these things come to a head and inflict unimaginable trauma on the central characters, 7-year-old twins Rahel and Estha. Throughout the book, I was torn between feeling glad that they weren't real so that these things couldn't be happening to them, and wishing they were so I could grab them and hug them for a long, long time.
The story is not told linearly, so I almost want to go back and reread it now that I know all the events as they happen. It skips from the day central to the plot to detailed backstories and flashbacks to 24 years after the fact when Estha and Rahel are living out the consquences of the day's events. It's a little hard to follow and at certain points I got annoyed with how long Roy delayed the telling of the actual bad things that happened to the family. She hints at them, but she uses a LOT of warning words like: "They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignicifant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in that thought." Who can read that without feeling desperate to know what transpires in these character's lives? And there are passages like this throughout almost the whole story. You don't really find out what they mean until the last thirty pages or so. However, all good writers know how to make their style fit their theme, and I think I've concluded that the excessive foreshadowing was deliberate. Roy is trying to create this oppressive sense of foreboding (she alludes to The Heart of Darkness frequently) because one of the themes of her book is the inevitability of tragedy. The way she weaves the story it seems as if nothing that happens to these people is avoidable. They might have made small decisions that would have lessened the pain, but their histories have come crashing toward this moment, and there isn't much that can be done. So even though I was mildly frustrated by the profusion of warnings, I also appreciate the implication that we all live with a kind of vague fear of what might come, and for most of us heartbreak can't be avoided.
I was also struck by the power that humans have to hurt each other. It is remarkable that we are so wasteful, so self-centered, so unforgiving in the way we storm through the world, creating collateral damage of most of our important relationships. There was a time when I thought that I could never be capable of something so terrible, but I've realized that it's a capacity within each person, and that it's not special to "evil people." We're all pretty evil without trying very hard. Fortunately a lot of us are spared the extent of our potential to wreak havoc, but we still manage to do more harm than good. Toward the end, the twins' mother puts this little nugget in their hearts: "If it weren't for you I would be free. I should have dumped you in an orphanage they day you were born. You're the millstones round my neck." Every kid does something at some point to cause fury in their parents, but these kids are seven, and this mother's anger is totally rooted in her bitterness that things did not work out the way she planned. It could not be more misguided when she directs it at her children. But they don't know that. There's no way for them to know that. So I'm shocked and indignant that she could use such words toward them, but I also know the same words lie in me, ready to be said. I pray I'll never say them, but they're there, lying dormant like a parasite just waiting for the right host to walk along. People hurt each other a lot. And we know we weren't meant to, which is why it's so hard on us even as we're doing it. It makes me long for heaven more.
What made me able to stomach this book was Roy's incredible ability to put the right words in the right order. She is truly a poet, and the things she does with language in this book are truly breathtaking. She has these little phrases that she repeats at various points throughout, and they always turn up when they are most meaningful, and she manages to imbue them with new depth each time they're spoken. Because the book is mostly told from Rahel's point of view, there are lots of capitalized words. It's so appropriate to the way that a small child views the world. Adults say things with unnecessary importance and make them sound as if they are proper nouns. And children think that everything is so weighty and meaningful (and maybe they're right) that surely lowercase letters do not lend the authority that words should have. I could almost hear the thoughts marching through Rahel's head as she decided which words should be given weight and which ones didn't need it. The most mundane physical descriptions (ordinarily, I have a very hard time attending to lengthy physical descriptions) are charged with poetry. Here's an example:
"It was a beautiful house. White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature's palette. Mossgreen. Earthbrown. Crumbleblack. Making it look older than it really was. Like sunken treasure dredged up from the ocean bed. Whale-kissed and barnacled. Swaddled in silence. Breathing bubbles through its broken windows. A deep verandah ran all around. The rooms themselves were recessed, buried in shadow. The tiled roof swept down like the sides of an immense, upside-down boat. Rotting beams supported on once-white pillars had buckled at the center, leaving a yawning, gaping hole. A History-hole. A History-shaped Hole in the Universe through which, at twilight, dense clouds of silent bats billowed like factory smoke and drifted into the night. They returned at dawn with news of the world. A gray haze in the rosy distance that suddenly coalesced and blackened over the house before it plummeted through the History-hole like smoke in a film running backwards."
So it's a beautiful book, which mostly makes up for the tragedy. And that's all inevitable anyway, so it might as well sound good.
I am happy to be done with it, mostly because every time I look at the cover I get "The Day of Small Things" by Alli Rodgers stuck in my head.
Next I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov and I will probably post more than once on that because it's very long, and also that way I'll have some accountability to keep up with it. Until then ...
Song In My Head: Naturally, "The Day of Small Things"
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