“There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.”
I read this not long after it came out in the late 90's. As a dive into international literature, it wasn't particularly easy - my knowledge of India isn't the greatest and a lot of this takes place in the late 1960's and involves issues relevant to India at the time, but not necessarily ones that were international. It did help to read up on some of the background issues here. Then again, this novel hits on universal themes. Failed relationships and the resulting impacts being a big one. The God of Small Things is a beautiful read; this is Roy's only novel (she is involved in a lot of social activism), but she has a particular voice - there's a dreamy quality to the writing in which I felt I was getting a very impressionistic idea of what was happening. There is a hard story going on as well, but she prefers to put a veneer over it, possibly due to going back in time. It's very effective.
This revolves around a relatively well off family in southern India. Ammu, the daughter who left to escape the tyrannical father, only to get married to an abusive, alcoholic man in Caluctta, has returned home with her twins, Estha and Rahel, who are seven as the story begins. Ammu's father has died, and her brother Chacko has returned from England (after divorcing his British wife) to run the family business (pickles). Also living there is her aunt, Baby Kochamma, who early in her life had converted to Catholicism in an ill-fated attempt to attract a Catholic priest who had come to their village.
Chacko's ex-wife comes to visit from England with their young daughter Sophie Mol. With the splintered family now back together, at least physically, events begin to transpire. Estha is molested in a bathroom while they see a musical. Ammu enters into a discreet affair with Velutha, a low caste handyman working at their farm, who is adored by both Estha and Rahel.
Eventually the affair is discovered and Estha, Rahel and Sophie run away to tragic consequences that are only compounded by the lingering bitterness in all the family members. The novel eventually returns to the present day in which the long separated twins reunite, but only after suffering much the same fate as their elders.
