Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1)

Rahel returns to her childhood home on a rainy summer's day after twenty-three years' absence. The reason that she is coming back is to see her twin brother, Estha. The only members of her family living in the house now are Baby Kochamma, Rahel's grandaunt, and Estha. Rahel recalls how very close she and her twin were, like one spirit. The twins are now thirty-one, the age that their mother was when she died. On entering the house, Rahel sees the bright blue Plymouth parked outside. Thoughts, memories and recollections come to her, with tastes, visions and smells

Ok ... this is a book that I found really difficult to read !!! I searched and searched the net and found a huge number of people who just loved this book ... It seems to be the norm recently that alot of the huge best seller books like 'The Time Travellers Wife' ,'Wuthering Heights' and this one I just did not get all the hype !!

I found this book difficult in many ways firstly I found it confusing with the characters names ... Most of the characters had a couple of names they where called by and this kept swapping throughout the book ... I had to keep referring to the back of the book to see who was who ... I found throughout the book it jumped from one story to another, and to boot I found the terminology was quite difficult to understand ...

And have to admit that I really skimmed through the last few chapters because I really wanted it over and done with ...

On a more positive note I have to say the detail in the book is wonderful and very descriptive.

If this book was not one on my reading challenge I think I would have given up a few weeks ago as it took me 3 weeks to read it ...

If you are doing this book and wish to have a more detailed account or study questions etc here's a great link

I rate this book 1*

5 comments:

Jeanette said...

Yeah, this is one of those books that so many people love but I have a feeling I would not be able to get in to very much.

Irish said...

I really struggled with it ... And didn't want to start a new book until I had read it ... I think it is one of those books that you will have to read a few times to really get it ....

Anonymous said...

looooved this book. So evocative...

From your tags there it seems you might be interested in heading over to Arukiyomi for a copy of the new version of Arukiyomi's 1001 books spreadsheet .

Along with calculating how many books you need to read a year before you die, there's all the 2008 edition books, all those removed from the 2006 edition, links to wikipedia , amazon.com and .co.uk and Google books.

Anonymous said...

ooops just realised that I think I've already told you about this spreadsheet. Didn't mean to appear to spam you. Just hard to keep track of who knows and who doesn't in the online book blogosphere!

Irish said...

Thanks for the spreadsheet have downloaded it ... Must have taken you ages to do it :) ... cheers

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