The God of Small Things (1997) by Indian author Arundhati Roy

thamrong

The God of Small Things (1997) by Indian author Arundhati Roy


Debutant Arundhati Roy won the Man Booker Prize  for her story of the two egg twins from Ayemenem, a small town in the southern Indian province of Kerala. Yes Kerala..a place to visit and see before one die. A very exotic place they say. Arundhati style and articulation in the usage of English language is very impressive and made me feel very humble. Born as an Anglo-Indian and a trained architect.
The story primarily takes place in a town named Ayemenem or Aymanam now part of Kottayam in Kerala state of India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth from 1969, when Rahel and Estha, a set of fraternal twins are 7 years old, to 1993, when the twins are reunited at age 31. Much of the story is written in a viewpoint sympathetic to the 7-year-old children. Malayalam words are liberally used in conjunction with English. Prominent facets of Kerala life that the novel captures are Communism, the caste system, and the Keralite Syrian Christian way of life.

seribulan

While every one is busy partying on success of Slumdog Millionaire, Arundhati Roy , the famous writer, anti globalization and anti-imperialist political activist has emerged as a conscience of India. A fierce critic of Indian ruling classes and established opinion, she spoke about the objectionable side of the movie

“People are selling India’s poverty big time both in literature and films. As they say, there is lots of money in poverty today. I am not against showing slums, but depicting them in a depoliticised manner, as has been done in the film, is quite unfortunate. Films do not show the real poor. Even if they are depicted, it’s not the true picture. The real poor are not shown in films because they are not attractive. Poverty sells but the poor do not. The film gives false hope to the poor that they too could become millionaires one day” The whole reaction can be seen here

Miss Roy wrote a wonderful critique of the movie for Dawn, the largest English newspaper of Pakistan. It was called “India not shining”. She writes:

“The debate around the film has been framed – and this helps the film in its multi-million-dollar promotion drive – in absurd terms. On the one hand we have the old ‘patriots’ parroting the line that “it doesn’t show India in a Proper Light’ (by now, even they’ve been won over thanks to the Viagra of success). On the other hand, there are those who say that Slumdog is a brave film that is not scared to plum the depths of India ‘not-shining’.

Slumdog Millionaire does not puncture the myth of ‘India shining’— far from it. It just turns India ‘not-shining’ into another glitzy item in the supermarket. As a film, it has none of the panache, the politics, the texture, the humour, and the confidence that both the director and the writer bring to their other work. It really doesn’t deserve the passion and attention we are lavishing on it. It’s a silly screenplay and the dialogue was embarrassing, which surprised me because I loved The Full Monty (written by the same script writer). The stockpiling of standard, clichéd, horrors in Slumdog are, I think, meant to be a sort of version of Alice in Wonderland – ‘Jamal in Horrorland’. It doesn’t work except to trivialize what really goes on here. The villains who kidnap and maim children and sell them into brothels reminded me of Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians”

On the political side of the movie she comments:

arundhati_roy“Politically, the film de-contextualises poverty – by making poverty an epic prop, it disassociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s poverty a landscape, like a desert or a mountain range, an exotic beach, god-given, not man-made. So while the camera swoops around in it lovingly, the filmmakers are more picky about the creatures that
inhabit this landscape.

To have cast a poor man and a poor girl, who looked remotely as though they had grown up in the slums, battered, malnutritioned, marked by what they’d been through, wouldn’t have been attractive enough. So they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the obviously British ’slumdog’ completely cowed the obviously Indian cop, even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown skin that two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting – it was a case of the PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago slum speaking in Yale accents”

The whole article can be reached here

seribulan

Books by Arundhati Roy
Born: 1961
Arundhati Roy Biography & Notes

Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, author of The God of Small Things, for which she won the Booker Prize.

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father. She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a bohemian lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof and making a living selling empty beer bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture.

Arundhati met her film-maker husband in 1984, under whose influence she moved into films. She acted in the role of a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib, and wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones and Electric Moon.

She began writing The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished it in 1996. She received half-a-million pounds in advances, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Aymanam.

Roy is also a well known peace activist. One of her first essays was in response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan. The essay, titled The End of Imagination, is a critique against the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection "The Cost of Living," in which she also begins her crusade against India's massive hydroelectric dam project. Since that time she has devoted herself solely to non-fiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for humanist causes.

In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project, but received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.

Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May, 2004, for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.


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        13 December, a Reader The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament by Arundhati Roy ( 2006)
        The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy ( 2002)
A few weeks after India detonated a thermonuclear device in 1998, Arundhati Roy wrote the essay "The End of Imagination", in which she said: "My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing." This is a collection of her subsequent essays.
Checkbook and the Cruise Missile         Checkbook and the Cruise Missile Conversations With Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian, Arundhati Roy ( 2004)
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile         The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile Conversations With Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian, Arundhati Roy ( 2004)
Come September         Come September by Arundhati Roy ( 2003)
        The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy ( 1998)
Field Notes on Democracy         Field Notes on Democracy Listening to Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy ( 2009)
The God of Small Things         The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy ( )
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, and 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.
        Il Dio Delle Piccole Cose by Arundhati Roy ( 2002)
India         India A Mosaic by ( 2001)
        Mumbai (Foro Social Mundial 2004) Balance Y Perspectivas De Un Movimiento De Movimientos by Arundhati Roy, Esther Vivas ( 2004)
New Nukes         New Nukes India, Pakistan and Global Nuclear Disarmament by Achin Vanaik, Praful Bidwai ( 2000)
Two of India's most respected and experienced journalists and longtime anti-nuclear activists, examine the cause and consequences of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, provide a framework for understanding the global context in which they occur and map out a new approach to global nuclear abolition.
An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire         An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire by Arundhati Roy ( 2004)
Booker Prizewinning novelist Arundhati Roy is also a powerful speaker, and here, in the form of essays, she collects her speeches on the subjects of imperialism, globalization, and what she sees as the disastrous occupation of Iraq by American troops during the administration of George W. Bush. Roy believes that the world is being taken over, divided, and corrupted by greedy global interests whose priorities are increasingly threatening to the world's poor--a population whose numbers are growing rapidly as the rich get richer. The only solutions are resistance and activism, and Roy urges people to take part in strikes, boycotts, nonviolent organizing, conscientious objection, and other tactics that can help avert disaster.
        Power Politics The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin by Arundhati Roy ( 2001)
Power Politics         Power Politics by Arundhati Roy ( 2002)
Three essays by novelist-activist Aruhdhati Roy on the evils of globalization and privatization--particularly the collaboration between American energy corporations and the Indian government in constructing dams that have driven hundreds of thousands of impoverished Indians from their homes.
Public Power In The Age Of Empire         Public Power In The Age Of Empire by Arundhati Roy ( 2004)
        Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan Causes, Consequences and India's Response by Arundhati Roy ( 1987)
War Is Peace         War Is Peace by Noam Chomsky, Tony Simpson, Johan Galtung, Ken Coates, HaroldHarold Pinter, Achin Vanaik, Arundhati Roy, Michael Barratt Brown, Steve Boggin, Pamela White ( 2001)
War Talk         War Talk by Arundhati Roy ( 2003)
Noted author Roy continues her exploration into nonfiction with this third volume, touching on a range of subjects afflicting the world, from poverty and privation to the lack of conscientious global leadership today.
War With No End         War With No End by Hanif Kureishi, John Berger, Arundhati Roy, Haifa Zangana ( 2007)
Draws on the perspectives of leading writers to explore the impact of the War on Terror throughout the world, in an anthology published in conjunction with the Stop the War coalition and United for Peace and Justice that includes contributions by such figures as John Berger, Naomi Klein, and Joe Sacco. Original.

        World Tribunal on Iraq Making the Case Against War by ( 2008)

thamrong

The story background is heavily autobiographical and the child character Rahel is so clearly Roy herself. This is understandable since ‘God of Small Thing’ is her first novel. The story line which include among other things, the miscarriage of marriage, family feuds, jealousy and murder are superbly written.  One thing I considered very alluring is the beauty of the setting of the rural Kerala. Kerala an obscure state within union of India itself is unique. I am yearning myself to visit Kerala one day in my life. A serene semi tropical state with bountiful coconut trees and vegetation akin to our own homeland.  They say one would never miss home if you are there…even the foods. Kerala or Malayalam food is rich of coconut cream and very spicy…Legend says that Malay food is a good carbon copy of Kerala cooking. I believe what they said. Kerala is world producer of coconut byproducts (the husk is exported to Germany for making Mercedes seats padding) and cardamom. The people are smart and very intelligent. Half of the population of 32 million Malayalam is outside Kerala including New York, London and Dubai. The illiteracy rate is 90% and that is something eh….What surprise me is the Communist government has ruled the state since independent 1947…another one is West Bengal. Religion! Equally divided between Hindu, Christian and Muslim.  A small community (probably one of the lost tribe) of Jews can be found in Cochin.

bedah_kg_pisang

aku dah dekat 3 kali ulang baca buku ni.  

thamrong

Bedah dah baca 3 kali....please give some inputs why do you have to  read 3X.