Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago...
Synopsis -
This extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family 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.
Review - This is the second book I have read by Arundhati Roy and I have enjoyed both. Interestingly I read them in reverse chronological order - Mother Mary comes to me, then The God of Small things. They are stand alone novels, so it worked, but I wish I had read them the other way.
This novel is set in Kerala, India, in 1969. The story is told through the memories of Rahel. It follows her, her twin brother and their single mother as they try to create a life after leaving their father, an alcoholic. Again Roy brings her powerful writing to the table. The story flows from flashbacks to the present easily. The characters and places easy to visualize as she draws you into their daily lives. Forbidden love, broken families, childhood experiences, social unrest, lost dreams - all are woven together as readers discovers the truth that it only takes the events of a single day, a single moment, to change the trajectory of their lives.
Sad, but beautiful, the story drew me in and kept me reading until the last page. And as with the previous book, I was given a window into a time, a place, a culture, and a way of thinking far different than the one I grew up in. The more we learn about other places, times and cultures, the better we understand what is happening in the world around us.
Buy the Book: Amazon US ~ Amazon CAOther Reviews - Mother Mary Comes to MeMeet the Author -A really fab interview HERE - Arundhati Roy is an Indian author and political activist, born on November 24, 1961, in Shillong, India, and studied architecture in Delhi where she how lives. She is a prominent voice for human rights and social justice issues. Roy has written numerous essays, screenplays, and other non-fiction works. She is the author of a number of books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages.. She has also written several non-fiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy, Walking with the Comrades, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, The End of Imagination, and most recently Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, co-authored with John Cusack. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize, the 2011 Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing, and the 2015 Ambedkar Sudar award.
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