The God of Small Things

From the perspective of literary achievement, I don’t hesitate to recommend The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a book about a set of fraternal twins and how Things Can Change in a Day. Structurally, linguistically, stylistically this book is awesome. I especially enjoyed it on a words-and-sentences level—Ms. Roy uses fun tricks like capitalizing Significant Words and runningtogether other words, and throughout the book makes marvelous use of repetition with certain phrases and images. It’s like she invented her own language, and it’s truly truly beautiful—poetic and unprecedented.

But content-wise, this book is quite grim, quite depressing. Save for one small window of happiness, there’s a persistent sense of foreboding and sort of sickening horror from the first page to the last, and what we're left with in the end is this incredible sadness. Too, the author writes India as a place I would never want to set foot. A place of crushing poverty, a world smothering in its own steaming filth and grease-laden decay, a country of pervasive environmental catastrophe and awful people.

Honestly I don’t know whether I can recommend this book to my sisters. My reading experience was conflicted. I was delighted and horrified at the same time—which is itself disturbing. But if you’re interested, read more about it in this New York Times review, and decide for yourself.