Sam Reviews "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

India's "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Jon Benet Ramsey Mystery", "An Indian Tragedy" if you will.  Which is to say, a long, round-about story, that could have been so much more interesting if written differently.  At least if you ask me.  I struggled so hard to get through this book, and if it wasn't a book club choice I more than likely wouldn't have finished it.  The writing style was odd and confusing.  Most of the time I felt as if I couldn't understand what was happening or follow along.  I had an audio book playing while I read this book hoping it would help me retain it but I ended this book confused.  The final Six Chapters are when I finally started getting intrigued by the book I am still unsure of how it ended...glad to have a book club to discuss this.

"A sunbeam lent to us too briefly."

"Estha's silence was never awkward.  Never intrusive.  Never noisy.  It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.
"Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was - into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets - to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye.  It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him.  It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke.  Some never noticed at all.
"Estha occupied very little space in the world."

"The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle."

"He walked through the world like a chameleon.  Never revealing himself, never appearing not to.  Emerging through the chaos unscathed."

"It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined."

"Ammu said that Chacko had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma.  Mammachi disagreed.  She liked to believe that he had never loved her in the first place."

"She was twenty-seven that year, and in the pit of her stomach she carried the cold knowledge that, for her, life had been lived.  She had had one chance.  She made a mistake.  She married the wrong man."

"Human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to.  You only had to look around you, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them."

"History's smell.  Like old roses on a breeze.  It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers.  Tomatoes.  In the tar on roads.  In certain colors.  In the plates at a restaurant.  In the absence of words.  And the emptiness in eyes."

"In her mind she kept an organized, careful account of Things She'd Done For People, and Things People Hadn't Done For Her."

"People always loved best what they Identified most with."

"Fast foster flies:  -
"Never let it rest
"Until the fast is faster;
"And the faster's fest."

"When you hurt people, they begin to love you less.  That's what careless words do.  They make people love you a little less."

"And the Air was full Of Thoughts and Things to Say.  But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said.  The Big Things lurk unsaid inside."

"Ariel the Tempest" - Ariel is a spirit who appears in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.  Ariel is bound to serve the magician Prospero, who rescued him from the tree in which he was imprisoned by Sycorax, the witch who previously inhabited the island.

"An angry feeling rose in her and stopped around her heart A Far More Angry Than Necessary feeling."

"Mammachi had never met Margaret Kochamma.  But she despised her anyway.  Shopkeepers's daughter was how Margaret Kochamma was filed away in Mammachi's mind.  Mammachi's world was arranged that way."

"Mammachi had a separate entrance built for Chacko's room ... so that the objects of his 'Needs' wouldn't have to go traipsing through the house.  She secretly slipped them money to keep them happy.  They took it because they needed it.  They had young children and old parents.  Or husbands who spent all their earnings in toddy bars.  The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee clarified things.  Disjuncted sex from love.  Needs from feelings."

"Leaving everybody to wonder where she had learned her effrontery from.  And truth be told, it was no small wondering matter.  Because Ammu had not had the kind of education, nor read the sorts of books, nor met the sorts of people, that might have influenced her to think the way she did.  She was just that sort of animal."

"He left behind a Hole in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar.  Through which their mother followed without even turning to wave good-bye.  She left them behind, spinning in the dark, with no moorings, in a place with no foundation."

"If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her.  If he loved her, he couldn't leave.  If he spoke, he couldn't listen.  If he fought, he couldn't win."

"The lovers make a suicide pact, and are found the next morning, washed up on the beach with their arms around each other.  So everybody dies.  The fisherman, his wife, her live, and a shark that has no part in the story, but dies anyway.  The sea claims them all."

"Trapped in the bog of a story that was and wasn't theirs.  That had set out with the semblance of structure and order, then bolted like a frightened horse into anarchy."

"The twins, not rude, not polite, said nothing. They walked home together.  He and She.  We and Us."

"[She] did her best to face the tragedy with equanimity.  To pretend  to face the tragedy with equanimity.  She didn't take time off from her job.  She saw to it that [her daughter]'s school routine remained unchanged - Finish your homework.  Eat your egg.  No, we can't not go to school.  She concealed her anguish under the brisk, practical mask of a schoolteacher.  The stern, schoolteacher-shaped Hole in the Universe (who sometimes slapped)."

"They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace.  Men without curiosity.  Without a doubt.  Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult.  They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew.  They worked it.  They were mechanics who services different parts of the same machine."

"[She] went forth into the world.  To drive a hard bargain.  To negotiate a friendship.  A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling,  Incomplete.  Flailing in the air with no foothold.  A friendship that never circled around into a story which is why, far more quickly than ever should have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive.  Like a fruit in season.  Every season."

"[He] used 'I suppose' to disguise questions as statements.  He hated asking questions unless they were personal ones.  Questions signified a vulgar display of ignorance."

"Like the ticking of a clock.  A sound you hardly noticed, but would miss if it stopped."

"Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.  Men's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor defy."