#God of Small Things

[sprachgitter]

on storytelling and repetition

“...the secret of the 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 thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

[zaynab8]

"... she said that choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice"

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

[a-girl-and-her-quotes]

Arundhati Roy - God of Small Things

[fennriskart]

Here's my second attempt at the hades game art style! This is a godsona I made for @thehappyastronaut. He wanted to be the god of small things/simple pleasures and had some interesting dialogue choices...

[bookreviewbyme]

The God of Small Things

ARUNDHATI ROY

I finished this book just yesterday and this is the book that inspired me to create this blog. While reading, there are so many times, I had to just put the book down and think, and each time I thought this way, there was a tranquil silence in my mind(which is quite unusual for me). The story was a very layered and complex one, and in a few sentences, there were feelings and stories between the lines. The main setting of the book was in Ayemenem, Kerala, revolving around the Ipe family. Each member different, with their own shares of trauma, happiness and wishes. Each place described has it's own story to tell and however irrelevant to the main plot, it helps us understand a connection between everything- everything lost, everything seen, everything unseen. The characters that mainly affect the plot are- the twins (Esthappen and Rahel), Ammu (their mother), Chacko(maternal uncle), Sophie Mol(Chacko's daughter), Margaret Kochamma(Sophie's mother), Mammachi(Ammu and Chacko's mother), Pappachi (Ammu and Chacko's father) and Baby Kochamma (Pappachi's unmarried sister). It jumps in the timeline between two importan t times- one when the twins were still children and the other when they have grown up. Traumatic events is a heavy element throughout the story. It shows different faces of trauma and different outcomes of the same one. Trauma due to marriage issues, the one gifted by parents, sexual trauma, society's- not just the words spun by the evil's guard dogs but also of the expectations. Higher caste people are required to be polished idols(ofcourse it is created and perpetuated by them themselves, so no one else is to blame) and lower caste(in the story mainly untouchables) people expected to kneel for no other reason than the sin of their birth. I didn't quite understand the relationship between the twins. They were connected not just in views but by mind and soul; though suffering the same atrocities of life, their reply to life is totally different from each other, except the emptiness in them. Since I understood so little about it, I won't comment further on it and will try to reread someday again. Throughout the story, their is also an underlying loneliness. And what I understood in the end, in life the God of Small Things is nothing but "Love". For, love doesn't exist in grand gestures and in costly gifts. Love doesn't ask for beg or seek anything. It always lurks in the background. Love is found in small things, it is found in simple eye contacts and laughing together, it is found in looking at another person's mole and remembering the outline of the face. It is found in celebrating each others existence even on bad days. It also touches topics of sexual perversions that arises from sexual curiosities at a young age. And the taboo around the topic just makes the curiosity manifest in a complex way. However, not a single line in the story shames anything about it which I felt was a very sensitive line to tread. It also talks a little about the toxic relationship between a son-obsessed mother and her son, jealousy, neglecting children and the worship of colonialists. Overall, I enjoyed reading it.

[inkscribbled]

Where do people go once tales end? Also where do old birds go to die? Why don't old ones fall like stones from the sky?

[supernova3space]

God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. (1997 Booker Prize Winner)

My heart is feeling stuff. So much stuff. So much.

[cosmosmoonbook]

we're prisoners of war,

our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere, we sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough.

Our lives never important enough To matter.

Arundhati Roy; God Of Small Things

[warpspeedch1c]

re-reading one of my favourites.

[hussyknee]

I often wonder what anti-shippers think about The God of Small Things. The incest at the end is very much not treated as bad, horrible and wrong but heartachingly sympathetic.

[eucalee]

The page that tormented me the most😩🤧

[superiorpixel]

-- The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy.

[zenmegblr]

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

Arundhati Roy

[a-girl-and-her-quotes]

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

[vmkhoneyy]

“People are inherently terrible” no!!! Have you ever seen a child wait for their friend while they tie their shoelaces? Have you ever known someone who would bring hurt squirrels and rabbits and mice to the nearest vet just so it doesn’t suffer? Have you seen someone grieve? Have you ever read something that hit your heart like a freight train? Have you looked at the stars and felt an unexplainable joy? Have you ever baked bread? Have you shared a meal with a friend? Have you not seen it? All the love? All the good? I know it’s hard to see sometimes, I know there’s pain everywhere. But look, there’s a child helping another up after a hard fall. Look, there’s someone giving their umbrella to a stranger. Look, there’s someone admiring the spring flowers. Look, there’s good, there’s good, there’s good. Look!!!!

[bookreviewbyme]

"In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was forever"