Il dio delle piccole cose

Okay, first things first. The God Of Small Things is a very very clever book, but what makes it exceptional is that it is both beautiful and crafty, a rare combination. This book has structure. Lots of it. She effectively creates a language of her own, a juvenile lucid language which complements the Leggi tutto

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less. Honestly, I wanted to like this one SO much but it was terrible. The novel follows a multi-generational Indian family in 1969. The matriarch, Mammachi, is their abused and blind grandmother. Ammu is the weary mother of fraterna

Lush, gorgeous prose: reading The God of Small Things is like having your arms and legs tied to a slowly moving, possibly dying horse, and being dragged face-down through the jungle. I mean, like that, only nice. You can't stop seeing and smelling everything, and it's all so foreign and rich. Potent Leggi tutto

Please excuse me while I go sit in this corner and be dreadfully underwhelmed. The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, and I'd heard very good things about it. And yet I really didn't like it. It's not a bad book - far from it. The characters she has created are really wonderful, and sh Leggi tutto

It is 1969 and India although having achieved independence twenty years earlier is still mired in its caste system. In this light, Arundhati Roy brings us her masterful first novel The G-D of Small Things which won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. A powerful novel filled with luscious prose and a heart Leggi tutto

As I stand just outside the compound with the untended garden - an uninvited, random visitor - the darkened Ayemenem House resembles a haunted mansion, belying the truth of the lives it once nurtured with maternal protectiveness in its cozy interiors. Derelict. Abandoned. Forgotten. But I remember. I Leggi tutto

Arundhati Roy - image from Slate This is a wonderful, image-rich novel told over several generations of a family in India. The central event is the death of a young girl, and how racism, and petty, CYA politics, results in the death of an innocent for a crime that was never committed. The central ch Leggi tutto

This is, without a doubt, the single worst book ever written. It makes virtually no sense, jumping from past to present tense so often and without warning that you have no idea whats going on. Out of nowhere the writer mentions filthy disturbing sexual things for no reason. I could not even find a st Leggi tutto

"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because Kathkali discovered long ago that the secret of Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with

I'm all by myself here, but what the hell. This reads like a graduate writing class exercise blown from 20 pages to 300. The metaphors, while occasionally fresh and unexpected, are tedious and frequently stand in for something that could be much less complex. The writing is self-conscious and preciou Leggi tutto