The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family -- their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin and her mother arrive on a Christmas visit, the twins learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Lawlessness of Love

To read Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, is to remind oneself how large the gods that dispense literary talent can be: Roy writes with extraordinary grace, creating a world so vivid and strangely beautiful that reading it is akin to entering a mirage. Like Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Divakaruni, Roy is fascinated by the collision of the ancient and modern in India -- the age-old class hatreds and bigotry that continue to thrive beneath roofs studded with satellite dishes. And like those writers, she is expert at limning the territory of cultural dislocation. Roy's achievement lies in her ability to explore this dislocation through the ebbing fortunes of one particular Indian family. The story of the privileged yet doomed Kochammas is in many ways a miniaturized tale of India itself, a country in which, as Roy states, "misfortune is always relative," a country in which personal turmoil is dwarfed by the "vast, violent, insane public turmoil of a nation."

The novel opens with the return of Rahel Kochamma to her home in the southwest Indian province of Kerala 23 years after the drowning of her eight-year-old cousin, Sophie. Rahel has returned to see her twin brother, Estha, who was abruptly sent away in the aftermath of Sophie's death; he has himself only recently returned, rendered literally silent by that long-ago trauma. The landscape Rahel walks through is fecund and dank: "Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks. Black crows gorge on bright mangoes." The riotous imagery is intentional: the monsoon air causes "locked windows to burst open," and "strange insects to appear...like ideas in the evenings." The sense of secrets about to burst, of tenuous bonds about to snap, pervades the narrative. The once-prosperous family Rahel is returning to (they used to own a thriving pickle factory) has been decimated: Rahel and Estha's mother, Ammu, is dead; their grief-stricken Marxist uncle, Chacko, a Rhodes scholar, has emigrated to Canada; Mammachi, their grandmother, is also dead. The only one that remains is their grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, whose obsessive love for gardening has been supplanted by a newfound passion for televised NBA tournaments and "Bold and the Beautiful" reruns. Seeing her seated in her turmeric-stained nightgown, swinging her puffy, tiny, manicured feet, it is hard to imagine the damage Baby wreaked on the twins so many years earlier.

It is to Roy's credit that the story that eventually surfaces of Baby's own past, including her unrequited love for a Benedictine monk, explains her actions while never excusing them. Indeed, the histories of all the members of the Kochamma clan -- unconventional, mysterious Ammu; Pappachi, the twins' grandfather, an accomplished but unacknowledged entomologist; Velutha, the gifted yet doomed untouchable -- are so fully portrayed that it is impossible to see even the most heinous among them as guilty. We see their foibles, dreams, weaknesses, and fury; we see them, in short, within the context of their own histories, and within the larger context of their position within Indian society. Wisely, Roy lets the fragments of their stories emerge gradually. Shifting back and forth through time, Roy circles the events of that summer slowly, all the while tightening the noose of her narrative. If the effect is occasionally chaotic, like the jumbled colors of a kaleidoscope before a pattern clicks into place, the complexity of Roy's mosaic redeems her.

A dazzling way with language doesn't hurt, either. In the humid atmosphere she has created, language itself seems to have twisted and exploded. Roy doesn't hesitate to make up words when ordinary ones don't suffice. Hence afternoon nightmares are called "aftermares," and fat Uncle Chacko's suit grows "less bursty" as he turns shy in front of the daughter he has not seen in several years. Odd yet compelling images abound: A house wears its steep gabled roof "pulled low over its ears, like a low hat." Bright plastic bags blow across the river bordering their home like "subtropical flying-flowers."

The God of Small Things isn't just about a summer when two children's innocence -- and a third's life -- is lost. It is about a country in which, as Roy states, "various kinds of despair compete for primacy." While exploring societal taboos and the often fatal consequences for those who disregard them, Roy, through the relationship between Estha and Rahel, also explores the limits of loyalty and the essential "Law-lessness" of love. In linking the political turmoil of India to the members of this extraordinary family, Roy has offered us a radically new history, a world so deeply imagined that it -- like the best of fictions -- reads as truth. The ability to touch and be touched, Roy knows, lies beyond legislation.

—Sarah Midori Zimmerman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The international publishing sensation of 1997 -- translated into 18 languages -- a magical, sophisticated tour de force now available in a stunning Vintage Canada edition.

The God of Small Things heralds a voice so powerful and original that it burns itself into the reader's memory. Set mainly in Kerala, India, in 1969, it is the story of Rahel and her twin brother Estha, who learn that their whole world can change in a single day, that love and life can be lost in a moment. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they seek to craft a childhood for themselves amid the wreckage that constitutes their family. Sweet and heartbreaking, ribald and profound, this is a novel to set beside those of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

SYNOPSIS

"Dazzling...remarkable. A novel that turns out to be as subtle as it is powerful." --The New York Times

"This outstanding novel is a banquet for all the senses we bring to reading." --Newsweek

Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997, The God Of Small Things was a stunning debut for Arundhati Roy. Roy's craftsmanship, highly original style, and intricate structure struck a chord with reviewers and readers alike. An international bestseller, this exquisite novel will surely be remembered -- and reread -- in years to come. It is a work that "makes you catch your breath, that changes the way you view life and its hidden complexities." (Earth Times)

Set in Kerala, India, in 1969, The God Of Small Things is the story of seven-year-old twins Rahel and Estha, born of a wealthy family and literally joined at the soul. Rahel and Estha are cared for by a host of compelling characters: their beautiful mother, Ammu, who has left a violent husband; their Marxist uncle, Chacko, still pining for his English wife and daughter who left him; their prickly grandaunt, Baby Kochamma, pickling in her virginity; and the volatile Veluth, a member of the Untouchable caste. When Chacko's ex-wife, Margaret, and lovely daughter, Sophie, unexpectedly return, the household is thrown into disarray. Tragedy strikes in the form of an accident (that may not have been accidental) and a terrifying murder.

Tremendously powerful and lushly romantic, The God Of Small Things effectively shifts between two time periods: Rahel's present-day trip home to see her mute, haunted twin brother, and a December day 20 years before -- the tumultuous day that tears the family apart. With mesmerizing language that brings to mind such authors as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner, The God Of Small Things ambitiously tackles such profound issues as family, race, and class, the dictates of history, and the laws of love. Rahel and Estha learn too soon that love and life can be lost in a millisecond.

To the Western reader, The God Of Small Things is both exotic and familiar, written in a sensual language that's entirely fresh and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of myth and culture.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jennifer Howard

Arundhati Roy's rich, humid fairy tale of a novel begins in June, when the monsoon rains send the province of Kerala, in southwestern India, into fecund frenzy: "The countryside turns an immodest green ... Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads." Behind this lush life, however, something festers. Rahel Kochamma, one of the novel's twin protagonists, returns to her family home in the Kerali town of Ayemenem, and decay slithers out to greet her. The house walls "bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against glistening stone."

This slithering overripeness hints at what's really rotten in Ayemenem: the past, specifically a chain of events set in motion on "a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent)," when the twins' half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, came to visit. Two weeks later Sophie was dead, drowned in Ayemenem's river, leaving behind a shattered family and a terrible secret. The narrative eddies along toward the secret of Sophie's death, but ultimately it flows into the drowning depths of history. The God of Small Things is a story of forbidden, cross-caste love and what a community will do to protect the old ways. The Kochamma family business, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, is emblematic of the theme. Ayemenem is practically pickled in history. Roy, an architect and screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, capably shoulders the burdens of caste and tradition, a double weight that crushes some of her characters and warps others, but leaves none untouched.

Roy takes up classic material, but she delights in verbal innovation and stylistic tricks. She runs words together -- "thunderdarkness," "echoing stationsounds" -- and plucks nouns from verbs and verbs from thin air. And she has hit on a striking way of getting at a child's point of view (told in third person, the story unfolds more or less as young Rahel and Estha experience it). When her mother tells a rambunctious Rahel to "Stoppit," Rahel "stoppited." At Sophie's funeral, a bat alights on a mourner: "the singing stopped for a 'Whatisit?' 'Whathappened?' and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping."

At times it feels as though you've dropped into a faux Rushdie novel, with cartwheeling corpses and talking statues. Mostly, though, Roy's verbal exuberance is all her own, and it makes The God of Small Things a real pleasure. History's lessons may be bitter, but Roy serves them up fresh, pungent and delicious. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins' behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history all of which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably shattered. Roy captures the children's candid observations but clouded understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that "at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children's view is never oversimplified, and the adult characters reveal their frailtiesand in one case, a repulsively evil powerin subtle and complex ways. While Roy's powers of description are formidable, she sometimes succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are few, and her powers coalesce magnificently in the book's second half. Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told.

Library Journal

This "piercing study of childhood innocence lost" mirrors the growing pains of modern India. Twin sister and brother Rahel and Estha are at the center of a family in crisis and at the heart of this "moving and compactly written book." (LJ 4/15/97)

Sarah Midori Zimmerman

The Lawlessness of Love

To read Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, is to remind oneself how large the gods that dispense literary talent can be: Roy writes with extraordinary grace, creating a world so vivid and strangely beautiful that reading it is akin to entering a mirage. Like Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Divakaruni, Roy is fascinated by the collision of the ancient and modern in India -- the age-old class hatreds and bigotry that continue to thrive beneath roofs studded with satellite dishes. And like those writers, she is expert at limning the territory of cultural dislocation. Roy's achievement lies in her ability to explore this dislocation through the ebbing fortunes of one particular Indian family. The story of the privileged yet doomed Kochammas is in many ways a miniaturized tale of India itself, a country in which, as Roy states, "misfortune is always relative," a country in which personal turmoil is dwarfed by the "vast, violent, insane public turmoil of a nation."

The novel opens with the return of Rahel Kochamma to her home in the southwest Indian province of Kerala 23 years after the drowning of her eight-year-old cousin, Sophie. Rahel has returned to see her twin brother, Estha, who was abruptly sent away in the aftermath of Sophie's death; he has himself only recently returned, rendered literally silent by that long-ago trauma. The landscape Rahel walks through is fecund and dank: "Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks. Black crows gorge on bright mangoes." The riotous imagery is intentional: the monsoon air causes "locked windows to burst open," and "strange insects to appear...like ideas in the evenings." The sense of secrets about to burst, of tenuous bonds about to snap, pervades the narrative. The once-prosperous family Rahel is returning to (they used to own a thriving pickle factory) has been decimated: Rahel and Estha's mother, Ammu, is dead; their grief-stricken Marxist uncle, Chacko, a Rhodes scholar, has emigrated to Canada; Mammachi, their grandmother, is also dead. The only one that remains is their grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, whose obsessive love for gardening has been supplanted by a newfound passion for televised NBA tournaments and "Bold and the Beautiful" reruns. Seeing her seated in her turmeric-stained nightgown, swinging her puffy, tiny, manicured feet, it is hard to imagine the damage Baby wreaked on the twins so many years earlier.

It is to Roy's credit that the story that eventually surfaces of Baby's own past, including her unrequited love for a Benedictine monk, explains her actions while never excusing them. Indeed, the histories of all the members of the Kochamma clan -- unconventional, mysterious Ammu; Pappachi, the twins' grandfather, an accomplished but unacknowledged entomologist; Velutha, the gifted yet doomed untouchable -- are so fully portrayed that it is impossible to see even the most heinous among them as guilty. We see their foibles, dreams, weaknesses, and fury; we see them, in short, within the context of their own histories, and within the larger context of their position within Indian society. Wisely, Roy lets the fragments of their stories emerge gradually. Shifting back and forth through time, Roy circles the events of that summer slowly, all the while tightening the noose of her narrative. If the effect is occasionally chaotic, like the jumbled colors of a kaleidoscope before a pattern clicks into place, the complexity of Roy's mosaic redeems her.

A dazzling way with language doesn't hurt, either. In the humid atmosphere she has created, language itself seems to have twisted and exploded. Roy doesn't hesitate to make up words when ordinary ones don't suffice. Hence afternoon nightmares are called "aftermares," and fat Uncle Chacko's suit grows "less bursty" as he turns shy in front of the daughter he has not seen in several years. Odd yet compelling images abound: A house wears its steep gabled roof "pulled low over its ears, like a low hat." Bright plastic bags blow across the river bordering their home like "subtropical flying-flowers."

The God of Small Things isn't just about a summer when two children's innocence -- and a third's life -- is lost. It is about a country in which, as Roy states, "various kinds of despair compete for primacy." While exploring societal taboos and the often fatal consequences for those who disregard them, Roy, through the relationship between Estha and Rahel, also explores the limits of loyalty and the essential "Law-lessness" of love. In linking the political turmoil of India to the members of this extraordinary family, Roy has offered us a radically new history, a world so deeply imagined that it -- like the best of fictions -- reads as truth. The ability to touch and be touched, Roy knows, lies beyond legislation.

Sarah Midori Zimmerman is a writer and editor in New York City.

Kirkus Reviews

A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work. The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their "inferiors' " hunger for independence and equality.

The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law"—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth" and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi" (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi" (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt" Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable" Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare") reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm," incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen "standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body") and sensuous descriptive passages ("The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud").

In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.... A Tiger Woodsian debut. — John Updike