The God of small things by Arundhati Roy

I finished it! Here's my review.

I know many people have loved this, and I can see why. It just wasn't completly for me. Please, feel free to leave comments and discuss it :)
valentina

The Complete Booker

Welcome to The Complete Booker. This is not so much a reading challenge, but a long-term project in which the participants aim to read all winners of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. There is no time limit, and members read short- and long-listed nominees as well.

You may participate solely on your own blog, or post to this one. If you would like to become a contributor to this blog, please email the moderator (an email address is required, so comments to this post won't work).  Please be sure to include a link to your own blog, if you have one, so it can be included in the participants list on the sidebar.  You will then receive an "invitation" with a link and further instructions.

Guidelines for Blog Participants:

• Introduce yourself via a blog post, and tell us about any Booker Prize winners you've read previously.
• You may post a review of each book you've read, even if it was a long time ago.
• As you read more books, you may post a full review, link to a review on your own blog, or just create a brief post noting the title(s) read. It's up to you!

Conventions for Labeling Posts:

• Always use your name as a label.
• Use the label, "Progress" for reading list updates.
• For each prize-winning book read, use the year won and the title of the book i.e.; "2006 - The Inheritance of Loss"
• For each nominee read, use the year nominated and note whether it was shortlisted or longlisted i.e.; "2007 - Shortlist"

Above all, have fun!
And by the way, be sure to check out 3M's The Pulitzer Project, the inspiration for The Complete Booker!

The God of Small Things - Wendy's Review

The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors. -From The God of Small Things, page 250-

Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God Of Small Things, is a dazzling masterpiece of language. Roy constructs the story around one central theme: Things can change in a day. Set in a small town in the state of Kerala, India - the novel shifts back and forth from present day to the past - building to a sudden and terrible end with suspense drenched in original language.

The novel centers around two twins - Rahel and Estha - and their mother, Ammu. Living with Ammu's extended family, the twins witness the unfolding of a drama which begins with the arrival of their young cousin from England, Sopie Mol. Relationships are gradually revealed, and the innocence of childhood becomes bared to the realities of adulthood. Although the reader is told the ending, this serves to create tension as Roy spirals backward and forward in time, constructing the pieces while uncovering the truth inch by inch. The reader's heart will bleed for little Estha with his pointy shoes and Elvis puff, who occupies "very little space in the world."

Roy explores the prohibition of love between castes, and the violence of the fledgling Communist movement - both topics which made this novel controversial in India.

The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking-backwards days all fell away. -From The God of Small Things-

Despite its difficult subject matter (or maybe because of it), Roy won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997 for this novel. With an artist's ability to construct scene, Roy immerses the reader in the novel:

She had forgotten just how damp the monsoon air in Ayemenem could be. Swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned themselves on Baby Kochamma's dim forty-watt bulbs. In the daytime their crisp, incinerated corpses littered the floor and windowsills, and until Kochu Maria swept them away in her plastic dustpan, the air smelled of Something Burning. -From The God of Small Things, page 11-

Highly recommended; rated 5/5.

The Blind Assassin - Kristen's Review

The Blind Assassin | $18.98 | 544 pp.

The Blind Assassin opens with the statement, "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." Only at the end of the book, when everything about this meandering, tragic, cryptic narrative of two sisters comes to its point, do you understand this sentence, down to the significance of its indefinite articles.

From the vantage point of old age, Iris, Laura's older sister, writes the story of their comings of age in the Depression. Laura is "strange," "odd"; she has deeply-held, unconventional religious beliefs, and exhibits a naivete dangerous for a young girl who is soon cut adrift by the falling apart of her family. Meanwhile, Iris understands more about the world around her. Two men dominate the lives and minds of each of the women in complex ways that Atwood only fully reveals near the end: one is a sinister figure, wealthy and powerful; one is an idealistic activist in hiding, easily worshipped.

Meanwhile, the story of two nameless lovers, written in the present tense, third-person, close but not too close to the consciousness of the woman. They tell each other stories, they sleep together, they play emotional games. He's harsh and often needlessly brutal, she's brave but vulnerable. Then there are newspaper articles, which use an amusingly cheesy style to encapsulate in puff pieces events which often have deep implications in Iris's or Laura's life.

To say more about the plot would give too much away, even though Atwood's beautiful prose is so prominent and memorable that it might be more of a draw than the story she spins. The deft way that she weaves this story and explores the identity of the two sisters, the artistry of it, become more and more apparent and then just dazzle in the climax. Iris's voice is authoritative and convincingly that of an old woman; her view on her own actions as a young woman is slightly more distant, and so focused on trying to find out more about the people around her that sometimes Young Iris is more of an enigma than her distracted, "odd" sister. Though the people in this book are very real, they're also separate and isolated in the labyrinth of human society.

If I had a complaint it was that the first couple hundred pages started so slowly. They were beautifully written, to be sure, but almost too mysterious -- I needed more. On the other hand, maybe it kept me reading, and I'm certainly glad that I did.

Hotel du Lac - Laura's Review

Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner
184 pages

First sentence: From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.

Reflections: Edith Hope was sent to the Hotel du Lac by well-meaning friends, in the hopes that the surroundings will bring her peace after an upsetting romantic incident. The hotel is in a Swiss resort area, on a lake near Geneva: "What it had to offer was a mild form of sanctuary ... a place guaranteed to provide a restorative sojourn for those whom life had mistreated or merely fatigued." It is autumn, the tourists are gone, and the hotel has only a few guests. Upon arrival, Edith tentatively approaches the salon for tea:

"As she descended the wide, shallow stairs Edith could hear well-behaved laughter echoing from some sort of salon ... then, as she approached, as if drawn to this sound, a sudden furious barking, high-pitched, peevish, boding ill for future peace."

Edith's apprehension about the Hotel du Lac turns to fascination as she observes the other guests in the salon. Edith is a sensible sort, always clad in tweed and cardigans. She first becomes acquainted with Iris Pusey and her adult daughter, Jennifer, wealthy, fashionable women, mourning Iris' husband and feeding their emotional hunger by shopping in boutiques. They try to recruit Edith, but she is intimidated by their world: "Where they saw luxury goods, she saw only houses of detention." One by one we meet other guests: the aging Madame Bonneuil, Monica (the dog's owner), and Mr. Neville, who takes an interest in Edith.

Meanwhile, Edith is longing for David, a married man with whom she had an affair. During her stay at Hotel du Lac, she half-heartedly attempts to purge the emotions surrounding this relationship. She is alternately fascinated and repulsed by Mr. Neville's attentions. Brookner's exquisite prose draws the reader right into the ambience of the Hotel and its day-to-day routines. And yet, as the autumn season draws to an end and the hotel prepares to close for the winter, Brookner throws in a few surprises that ultimately make for a very satisfying ending. Highly recommended. ( )

The original review can be found here.

I'm reading my first book for the project...

but I'm not making a lot of progresses. It's "The God of small things". At first I liked her style and I thought I was going to love it. But for some reason now I'm stuck. Maybe I'm too distracted, maybe it wasn't the right time. But I feel that her constant literariness makes the reading heavy and less fluent. I'm trying to get into the story but I'm almost half way through it and it feels like I haven't started yet. Should I keep going? I will anyway, I want to be able to say that I've read it even if I will end end not liking it, but I was wondering if somebody had the same feeling, or if somebody loved it, they could maybe tell me why so I might me more pushed to finish it!

Announcing the 2007 Booker Prize Shortlist

The 2007 shortlist was announced today, narrowing the field from 13 to 6:

1. Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
2. The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
3. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
4. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
5. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
6. Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

The winner will be announced on October 16.

Has anyone read any of these books?

Tiv's Introduction (The Individual Voice)

So here's yet another reading project I'm joining that has no time limit. I've only read one of the books so far, Disgrace, (which is disgraceful, I know). I loved it and would like to read it again to remind myself why I loved it so much. I don't have a very good memory for movies or books. I think it's because I go into such a deep, dream-like trance that afterwards, it's like awakening from a dream. It's all kind of fuzzy and gets fuzzier with time.

This is a really nice selection of books, so I think I might actually read the specific books by each author, though I may also read some others, say, by Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetze or Roddy Doyle, having them already on my shelf. I have read every single book by Margaret Atwood except the one on the list. And I may exempt myself from Schindler's List. No offense to the Nazis, but I saw the movie and I am not interested in reading about the one exception among them, heroic as he was. There should have been more.

Anyway, what a nice project to share with other booklovers! I have no idea yet where I will start.