TGOST and AF and TDVC

Just finished Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. The book is old but had I read it earlier, I would not have been able to appreciate it.

It is the poignant story of two twins Rahel and Estha, who are separated by fate but linked in their destiny. And not in the Kumbh Mela. Their mother is the divorced wife of a man whom she had married against her family's wishes. Soon after their marriage, he shows his true colours. His concern for his family can possibly be compared to Uncle Sam's concern for Nepal. Soon after the birth of the twins, he is threatened by his employer who offers to let him keep his job in return of his wife. Ammu, as the children call her, leaves soon after to arrive in her parent's house where her past continues to haunt her. Through envy, through jealosy, through ill-will, through the Marxism, and through the clash of religions. It rears its head once again when the daughter of the children's uncle arrives from Britain, and somehow manages to die. In the meantime, the divorced mother of two somehow manages to find love in the arms of a Paravan, who works in their house as a carpenter. I will not give any more of the story away, but what follows changes the life of all concerned. Forever.

What I really liked about the story is the language and Roy's almost lyrical manner of writing. I haven't seen better use of alliteration [As tho' I have seen lots of it]. She has her own way of describing imagery, which use very simple words and similies to describe very complex images and human emotions. The words come back to haunt you as you read the book. She keeps jumping from the past to the future to the present and back. Although you tend to smell the plot right through the book, it unravels completely only in the last chapter. I have also heard that the book has autobiographical overtones, but do not exactly about that. You can find more about Roy and the book here and here.

ehT doG fO llamS sgnihT is surely Worth a read if you haven't read it and worth a re-read if you've already read it.

I also read George Orwell's Animal Farm sometime back. I really loved the way Orwell makes use of substitution and allegory to tell a very pertinent and politically motivated tale. His analysis of human psychology is truly mind-boggling. Greed is not just presented as an emotion, it is a reality throughout the book. The way the pigs make use of the other animals to live a regal life themselves can find many a equivalents in the real world. And the way the laws are bent and broken is so real that you almost find yourself finding instances in newspapers when you read them next time. The message tends to live beyond the last page: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others".

A very thin book which should be on the read-list of every person.

UPDATE: Just finished Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I read it in under 30 hours which included, among other things, a 7 hour sleep, my daily ablutions, a visit to the temple [a rarity] and pandal hopping in Calcutta's ugly traffic. That clearly goes to prove that even at 490 pages, it is a very quick read. In fact, once started I just could not control myself. I even took it with me when I went pandal-hopping just so that I could finish it during the traffic jams.

The story is probably well known now. Robert Langdon is a Harvard symbologist, who in a trip to Paris is accused of the muder of the curator of the Louvre, the famous Museam. A cryptologist, Sophie, helps him escape, but they find themselves going deeper and deeper into a maze which contains the greatest secret hidden by mankind, the greatest con act ever. After reading a good part of the book, I had been suspecting a prime character as being the villain, but I was proved completely wrong. Brown is a master of suspense, and what I really liked was the way he made up an imaginative story while giving such substansive and believable evidence about it, and the way he weaves history into his own plot. You really tend to believe it by the end.

A compulsive page turner. UnPutDownAble.

Visit DanBrown.com, and DaVinciCode.com. Also visit Lisa Shea's site for a criticism of Da Vinci Code.