Tuesday, June 06, 2017

The God of Great Things, India’s Arundhati Roy returns with a new novel...

Imagine comparing a beautiful landscape painting with a harsh TV documentary on contemporary social issues; an old sepia photograph with an award-winning controversial photo exhibition; a multi-layered poem to a collection of activist songs. There may be truth in each of these forms and they may even approach the same subjects, but the way of telling the story remains different. The differences are as vast when one compares the two novels by the award-winning Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy.

Arundhati Roy belongs to an elite club of internationally recognized Indian authors writing in English. She rose to immediate fame with her first novel, The God of Small Things, published in 1997. The book has since claimed the Man Booker prize; it has gone through reprints and has become a hero of many essays and academic articles on English literature. Roy, in turn, became a famed writer internationally but within India she gradually became even much more famous for her activism and blunt comments on Indian politics and the state of society.

Twenty years have passed and now Roy is giving us her second novel: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. How does it fare in comparison to the The God of Small Things? As mentioned above, the task of comparing is not an easy one as these are not simply two different novels by the same author but two different literary forms. Full story...

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  3. Arundhati Roy: Beware the ‘gush-up gospel’ behind India’s billionaires...
  4. Arundhati Roy: Walking with comrades (Corporate India and the tribal...
  5. Arundhati Roy: What have we done to democracy?

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