Some of us here hate Arundhati Roy with almost pathologic passion, and don't know why: as for me, I hate her for the incessant verbal diarrhoea that would brook at no opposition: unintimidated, she drones on and on: that is neither here nor there.
But I found this delightful Digest (via Blog of a Bookslut) of her "God of Small Things," by John Crace: brilliant-
"It was a skyblue day in 1969 when Rahel found herself in a fictive time-slip. She gasped in amazement as the skyblue Plymouth pulled up and her uncle Chacko got out and talked about how Pappachi started drinking after a moth wasn't named after him and used to beat up Mammachi until he warned him off, how he had been a Rhodes scholar, had married Margaret and had a child, Sophie Mol, how she had left him, how he had returned to Kerala to run Mammachi's Paradise Pickles and Preserves factories, how he was a supporter of the Keralan Communist Party run by Comrade Pilla, how ...
"Stop, Uncle," Rahel said. "There are too many names, too many things going on. I can't keep up."
"That's the whole point," Chacko replied. "This is India, a land of sensory and poetic overload, a land where small boats bob in rippling water of green silk, a land teeming with literary prizes for those who can find the right imagery to win them. But these are small things."
"Is there a God of Small Things?"
"There must be if I won the Booker,""...
