Even at age 7, Estha is the reserved one, dignified in his Elvis pompadour and pointy beige shoes. She shows us the twins' uncanny spiritual connection with each other and their longing for their mercurial mother's approval. Roy does a marvelous job of conjuring the anomalous world of childhood, its sense of privilege and frustration, its fragility, innocence and unsentimental wisdom. Writing largely from the point of view of the twins, Estha and Rahel, Ms. As one of her characters observes: ''Anything's possible in human nature. Roy's musical, densely patterned prose combines with the mythic power of her tale to create the impression of magical realism (her work has already been compared in India to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez), the most fantastical events in ''God of Small Things'' are not the products of a fevered imagination they are simply the byproducts of everyday passions. Set in southern India against a backdrop of traditional religious and caste taboos, her story depicts the tragic confluence of events - both personal and political, private and public - that bring about the murder of an innocent man and the dissolution of a family.Īlthough Ms. Roy creates a richly layered story of familial betrayal and thwarted romantic passion by cutting back and forth between time present and time past.

While such questions may sound crudely melodramatic, they provide the narrative architecture of a novel that turns out to be as subtle as it is powerful, a novel that is Faulknerian in its ambitious tackling of family and race and class, Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character.Ī screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, India, Ms. What caused the boy named Estha to stop talking? What sent his twin sister, Rahel, into exile in the United States? Why did their beautiful mother, Ammu, end up dying alone in a grimy hotel room? What killed their English cousin, Sophie Mol? And why has a ''whiff of scandal'' involving sex and death come to surround their bourgeois family? ''The God of Small Things,'' Arundhati Roy's dazzling first novel, begins as a sort of mystery story.

The god of small things book