From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: Re: God of Small Things: pointless dissection
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 17:02:00 +1300


Here is my own, personal review of God of Small Things, which I read some
years ago.  At first, the countless similes ("a is like b", "x is like y")
were annoying.  But they were good similes, after all.  I liked the simile
between the little girl's hairstyle and a fountain. And I was struck by the
smell of the river on people - how much it can mean. Has anyone else written
of the smell of the river so powerfully?  Mark Twain should have done, but
he didn't, for all his intimate love of rivers, and for all his
understanding of class and race and how deeply they hit the heart and the
gut - he did not get the smell of the river on the bodies of Huck and Jim.

But in my view, the part of Roy's novel that will speak to all humanity is
the description of what happened to Velutha when he got beaten by the
police.  The memory of this description will always stay with me. We hear
such abstract words as "beating", "brutality", even "torture", but we do not
know the concrete facts hidden by these words.  A beating can mean a few
punches and bruises.  Torture can mean electoshocks, or near drownings, or
blows to the soles of the feet leaving no physical traces.  We can live with
all this.  I cannot live with what happened to Velutha, and I know that what
happened to him in Arundhati Roy's fiction has happened in real life to real
people.  Real people, innocent and kind people, in Kerala, and other parts
of South Asia and the world.  Will anyone dare to say that what Roy
described is mere fantasy?  "It may have happened somewhere else, at some
other time. Someone else may have done these things in the past, but not
here, not now, not by me or the people I know," is what you hear when you
ask.  "We are civilized people," they say.

If Arundhati Roy has been castigated and mocked, if efforts have been made
to discredit her, here is the reason:  she told the truth, and thousands of
people have read what she wrote. Maybe some hundreds have thought about the
novel and taken it seriously.  It is not just that Roy is a good writer who
is able to draw readers into the world she describes.  Many fine novelists
create impossible yet compelling worlds.  Many fine novelists are great
entertainers, better entertainers than Roy, more original in their choice of
themes, more skillful in their use of words.  But Roy told the truth.  In
India, someone who has done no wrong has suffered the fate of Velutha.  And
again it is happening now, and again it will happen.  Knowing this, more
people will be moved to action.  And such action will be a problem for those
who are pleased with the way things are going now.



     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---