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

"Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning."

I could open this book to any page, to any line and feel moved by the emotion and the language that it holds. The entire book is quotable. It's beautiful. It's art. The way that Arundhati Roy is able to describe moments, feelings, experiences and the In Between is pure genius. It is incomprehensible to me that somewhere, in someone's head, this language exists. That she sees the world through lenses that lend movement and thought, no matter how small, to poetry. The imagery she uses, the way she describes without using the concrete descriptions we've come to expect. She molds and shapes language to her needs, not the other way around. She's a master and I bow to her. 

The God of Small Things is a story about two twins who do not consider themselves as separate. They refer to themselves only as us, we or me. They are deeply connected in inexplicable ways. Their story unfolds in the shadow of their wreck of a family with only the innocence of childhood to protect them. When their cousin comes to visit, they find that Things Can Change in a Day and the whole book revolves around that day and the chain of events that occur afterwards.

I will say that this book happens in anything but chronological order. I feel like it was laid out to us in waves, in swirls, in the movements of a tempest. Hints were dropped, incomplete information was laid out and then moved away from to tell another portion of the story that had happened years before. In a way, I feel this structure added to the beauty of the book and the almost ethereal Otherness that permeates through the whole thing. It also establishes a sense of foreboding and inevitability that I found both stressful and necessary. It added that extra layer of connectedness though between the twins and the reader and made their story more real and personal. I spent each page in anticipation waiting for something terrible to happen and was, by the end, emotionally exhausted. I don't regret it though. 

The God of Small Things is a work of art, I'll say it again. It has its moments that I feel tainted my glowing review of it (see below), but overall I feel that hollow behind my heart filled in way that can only be done with beautiful words.  

p.s. Language was used sparingly. There were no f-bombs. Really the only curse present was sh**, and even that I didn't feel was used in an aggressive way but really mostly to describe feces. There was one usage of "dick" and "c***", but that's all I noticed on the language front. There were three scenes that I wish I had been aware of before starting this book (so SPOILERS): A scene where a man takes advantage of the boy twin and forces him to give him a hand job in exchange for a soda. I am sick and tired of coming across this both in books and in the news. It makes me physically angry. They are children. 

Second, there is a scene towards the end where the twins sleep with each other. It glosses over it, doesn't describe it even a LITTLE, and if you were skimming you probably wouldn't have realized it happened at all. There are plenty out there who have their theories and explanations for why this wasn't wrong or gross, but I'm not going to put them here or try to explain it myself. I'll leave it up to you. 

Lastly, the very last couple pages is basically an in detail sex scene on the banks of a river. It's... passionate, I guess I would say. Made me uncomfortable, so I thought it was worth a mention.