And I started reading the beginning again. And even when I was…I wanted to take notes, you know, just, you know, to talk about it. And it’s of course is because I was writing. I read it when it came out but it was…it just stayed in my mind. And so many people, so many different cultures have embraced it. Yet it was and I believe continues to be an international best seller. Maybe more of this book, because not only are you entering India, which is a world that’s quite foreign to me, but the language is so unique. I will confess that I struggled with the first 25 pages.

And then I was able to sink into the emotional momentum of the current of the book and got swept away and put it down feeling as if I’d been torn in two. The language was so different from anything I was prepared for and jumped off the page so vividly almost as if its hands were around my throat. I read The God of Small Things as soon as it came out in 1997 and at first I didn’t really know what to make of it. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. But it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a tea bag. Equally it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago long before the Marxists came, before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendancy, before da Gama arrived, before the ‘s conquest of Calicut. (Reading): To say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. It’s a transcendent story.Įven though you know that what happened was tragic, the fact that it happened was wonderful. And even if the ending is certainly sad, it’s so much more than that. Whether it’s women who aren’t allowed to follow the direction of their hearts, men who suffer because they’re from the wrong caste, children who suffer because they’re too young to know better. It’s a book that’s a love letter to the powerless. Click here to download transcript Invitation to World Literature: The God of Small Things Video Transcript

The god of small things book