Matt Quann's Reviews > The God of Small Things

There was no reasoning with this book. It caught me with its word-shaped eyes and wanted to lock horns. It threw me to the ground and thrashed me every time I picked it up. During some of these thrashings I came out on top, but most of the time I was overwhelmed by the book’s overpowering strength in spite of its meager spine. In the last match, as if it had been training me, I overcame the book. I had naught to do but reflect upon the struggle that had brought me to slamming shut the final pages in victory and

I Found Myself Confused

In the wake of this book I found myself asking a question I had asked myself before, but never properly answered. Not to say that I will answer it properly here. Not to say that there is a proper answer. The question:

Can I forgive a book for a painful read if it pays off in the end?

My fiancé gifted Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things to me for Christmas because:

a) It was a Booker Prize Winner
b) It was written by an author not from Canada, the US, or the UK.
c) She read reviews that both praised and bemoaned this book

She knows me well! Indeed, the book hit a lot of my personal tick-boxes. The God of Small Things had been on my radar for a long time and as I settled in to the first chapter I was blown away by how difficult it was to follow. The writing, floral and descriptive, was of such density that I was taken aback. Of course, this subsided after a while and I became adjusted to Roy’s prose. With that said, there’s a lot going on and it isn’t explained in a manner that could be described as linear.

The story starts, stops, and jumps around with enough regularity that it almost demanded to be read it long sittings. Roy slips backwards in time within paragraphs, at times forcing me to go back and read what I had just read to make sure I was interpreting the passage correctly. Roy also jumps around between characters frequently. Since she playfully gives her characters variations on their names or uses parts of the story that have passed to inform their description, it can be tough to get a handle on the cast.

But once you let go of your expectations and go along for the ride, the book has many rewarding qualities. The characters are each well developed, understandable, and are tied together by a shared fate. Though the novel read as disjointed throughout, Roy brings everything together quite well. The novel’s first chapter serves as an odd synopsis that is obscure enough that you wouldn’t be able to point out its intricacies, only identify the major tragedies. The character-driven plot becomes rewarding when the artifice of the fragmented timeline is laid bare by the novel’s end. Whether or not that reward is worth the strain is another topic.

Certainly, it isn’t all strain. Roy took home the Booker Prize in 1997 for this novel, and it is easy to see why it might have come out on top. It has a unique format, but more importantly, really, really attractive, if extravagant, writing. Some of the descriptions in this novel are so vivid that they’ll have you basking in their beauty and horror. In that way Roy has done an impressive thing: shown the beauty and the terror inherent in the real world. Of course, it also makes for an exhausting read.

I’m sure reader opinion will vary on this one since appreciation of style is such a subjective matter, but Roy’s prose both works for and against her. It makes for some pretty mind pictures, no doubt. It also had me putting down the book to take a break more often than I do with novels. The book is layered with metaphor, endlessly self-referential, and sometimes obscure enough that I’ll admit, unembarrassed, that I had no idea what it was supposed to mean.

So, did the tying together of everything justify the reading? Well, certainly I’ve learned things from the reading about prose that are beneficial. However, the struggle never made me feel rewarded like I have been with other challenging works. There’s a lot of beauty and great thought to behold in this novel of India, but I always felt a little removed from the proceedings. Somewhere amidst a struggle with stream of consciousness, appreciation of writing, bafflement at a timeline, and enjoyable characters you'll find my opinion.