Arundhati Roy basati sul libro consigliato "Il Dio delle Piccole Cose"

About the author

_ Daugther of a Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala (southwestern tip of India) and

a Hindu tea planter from Bengala “A lot of

_ Childhood in Aymanam (Ayemenem) in Kerala the atmosphere in "God of Small

Things" is based on my experiences of what it was like to grow up in Kerala. Most interestingly, it

was the only place in the world where religions coincide, there's Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism

and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down.

[…] I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing up and I'm still aware of them now.

[…]. To me, I couldn't think of a better location for a book about human beings. I think the kind of

landscape that you grew up in, it lives in you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in

cities so much, you may love a building but I don't think you can love it in the way that you love a

love. […]. If you spent

tree or a river or the colour of the earth, it's a different kind of your very

landscape just seeps into you. […] I

early childhood catching fish and just learning to be quiet, the

grew up in very similar circumstances to the children in the book. My mother was divorced. I lived

fashion.”

on the edge of the community in a very vulnerable

“Given the way things have turned out, it's easy for me to say that I thank God that I had none of

the conditioning that a normal, middle-class Indian girl would have. I had no father, no presence of

this man telling us that he would look after us and beat us occasionally in exchange. I didn't have a

caste, and I didn't have a class, and I had no religion, no traditional blinkers, no traditional lenses on

my spectacles, which are very hard to shrug off. I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in

‘Whatever you do, don't get married’”

India whose mother said,

_ Higher education at the School of Planning and Architecture (like her heroine Rahel), New Delhi

_ Early work for television and cinema as screenplay writer and also performer

_ 1992-1996: first (and only) semi-autobiographical novel, The God of Small Things

_ 1997: Booker Prize for Fiction for the novel. Symbolically she donated the prize to a grassroots

–

activist group which opposes "big dam" developments in India how a world recognition in

literature may support local battles and change + performative role of literature

_ Journalist, essay writer and activist

_anti-globalization: she was against globalization when it means excess and transformation which

cause devastation or is aimed at economic and political conquest. She’s actually very critical.

Globalization led to wealth, but who is taking advantage of it? Plus, it polarize the human condition

who have a lot and people who don’t. only a minority

in extreme ways, especially in India: people

of the Indians can actually take advantage of it.

American “imperial democracy”

_Vs. (neo-imperialism and global policies)

nuclear weapons policies (“The End of Imagination”,

_Vs. India’s 1998), militarisation and

exploitative industrialization of power sector (e.g. vs. the Narmada dam project)

_ "Globalization, though it professes to homogenize the human condition, seems actually to polarize

it in extreme ways" (Sankaran, in Joseph & Wilson, eds., Global Fissures-Postcolonial Fusions,

2006) India have been […] loaded onto

_ "the people of two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny

little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a

glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the

darkness and disappears" (Roy, Power Politics, 2001)

“As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's

no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife. So I'm not talking about being anti-

development. I'm talking about the politics of development, of how do you break down this

completely centralized, undemocratic process of decision making? How do you make sure that it's

over their lives and their natural resources?”

decentralized and that people have power (she is

critical of some aspects of indian society: she’s against impositions of any kind which limits

humans’ freedom, she’s against the caste system)

Fiction and Truth

Fiction encourages action, which can impact on reality. She is against power, because it is used in a

wrong way in the modern world.

“I don't see a great difference between The God of Small Things and my works of nonfiction. As I

keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort now

midwife of understanding. […] The God of Small

is to remove that distinction. The writer is the

Things is a book where you connect the very smallest things to the very biggest: whether it's

the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of water or the quality of the moonlight on a river

your house, your bedroom.” (Interview 2001)

or how history and politics intrude into your life,

“Il tema – –

centrale di gran parte dei miei scritti di narrativa come di saggistica è la relazione tra

circolare, nel quale tutti sono coinvolti. […]

chi ha il potere e chi non lo ha, e il conflitto infinito,

Anche se potrebbe sembrare diversamente, i miei scritti non trattano veramente di storia o di

nazioni, ma di potere. Della follia e della crudeltà del potere. Della fisica del potere. Credo che

l'accumulazione di un potere vasto e illimitato nelle mani di uno Stato o una nazione, una

– –

multinazionale o una istituzione o anche di un individuo, un coniuge, un amico o un fratello

eccessi […]” (Intervista 2002)

produca, a prescindere dall'ideologia, una serie di

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the

unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places.

To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To

respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And

never, never, to forget.”

Defence of love and beauty as the basic givens of human interaction across the boundaries of race,

religion, state politics:

“Railing against the has happened. […]. All we can do is to change its

past will not heal us. History

destroying what we don’t. There is beauty yet in

course by encouraging what we love instead of

this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and

beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, re-invented and made our own. We

only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether

have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will

hem or not.” (The Cost of Living, 1999)

we use The God of Small Things (1996)

“Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one” John Berger

Magical realism -> combination of fantastic and realistic elements, talking about reality making use

of elements of fictions. Fantasy helps the reader to understand the reality better.

Story vs. Plot

_ Setting: Ayemenem or Aymanam in Kerala, time-line shifting from 1969 (when Rahel and Estha

–

are 7) to 1993 (when they are reunited at age 31) interlaced stories on a rich gallery of characters

from the dizygotic twins’

mostly points of view (episodes in their life- their Bildung)

_ Patriarch Pappachi (= grandfather), imperial entomologist and Mammachi (= grandmother),

twins’ mother) and Chacko (Oxford scholar)

parents of Ammu (the

_ Ammu and Baba (alcoholictea planter), their divorce, her return home

_ Baby Kochamma (grand-aunt) and her romantic love with Father Mulligan –

_ Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, his English wife, and their daughter Sophie Mol (=girl) their

Margaret’s and Sophie’s visit in Kerala

divorce and then

_ Communist Velutha (handyman and pariah) and his love affair with Ammu, ending in tragedy

_ The "Orangedrink Lemondrink man" and his sexual abuse of Estha, one of the reasons for his

perpetual silence

twins, their boat trip and Sophie’s drowning

_ The

_ Baby Kochamma’s machinations to accuse Velutha and later Ammu

_ The twins’ separation and Ammu’s lonely death

_ Rahel’s marriage and divorce in the US

_ Rahel’s return to Ayemenem, and reunion with Estha

Cosmopolitan novel imagining the world rather than 'postcolonial novel' re-imagining the nation

Bildungsroman to talk about both the nation and the world

Postmodern novel

Postmodern discourse –

_ Style and technique Roy–Salman Rushdie

_ Constantly changing perspective challenging authorial/authoritative voice

_Non-linear, multi-perspective, kaleidoscopic & cyclic narrative

_Dialogue of fantasy and reality children’s talk,

_ Extravagant diction (capitalization, listing, verbal play, poems, songs, proverbs,

“Things can change in a day”)

refrains -

_Hybrid language and style: Malayalam words nestled in the English; high & low

“In India the thing that I’ve from the fairytale tradition […] is oral

taken most from, I think, apart

[…] It’s a

narration. very eclectic form; and, of course, not at all linear. I mean, the story does not

go from the beginning to the end but it goes in great loops and circles back on itself, repeats earlier

[…]. This is not formlessness

things, digresses, uses sometimes a kind of Chinese-box system but a

form which, after all, is many thousands of years old and has adopted this shape for good reasons.

And it struck me that the storyteller, much more so than the novelist, has the problem of holding

the audience. […] And so everything he does is done to hold the audience. This suggested to me

that what we were being told was that this very gymnastic, convoluted, complicated form was, in

fact, the very reason why people were listening.”

(“Fictions are Lies That Tell the Conversation” (1985),

Truth: Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass in

in M. Reder, ed., Conversations with Salman Rushdie, 2000)

YET:

_ Roy vs. postmodern = "postnatural" phase of a commodified technological world, turned into

material for production and consumption, and in which simulacra matter more than essence

_ Also vs. Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the “naiveté of ecological conviviality”, and in search of better

compromises between local and global, tradition and innovation

_ To Roy not all is gone: she still believes in manenvironment interdependence (post-pastoral novel:

no exoticist myths ab