Resumo de The God Of Small Things

The God of Small Things is not one story, but many - skillfully interwoven.

The thread that binds this sheaf of smaller stories together is that of
the death of Sophie Mol, the half-Indian, half-British family darling
who comes to visit the family of Rahel and Estha in Kerala, the
southernmost part of India.

The stories are so tightly interwoven that it is a difficult task to
untangle them all. Rahel and Estha are seven-year-old fraternal twins,
a girl and boy respectively. Their family is an upstanding Syrian
Christian clan, commandeered by a blind matriarch, who considers her
grand-twins wild half-breeds because their father was a Hindu.

Their mother, Ammu, is beautiful and defiant, refusing to be ashamed of
what one would consider a poor choice in the past - marrying an
alcoholic in a desperate move to get out of her oppressive family.
Having relocated to Kerala after divorcing her husband, she becomes
involved with Velutha, an Untouchable whose family has worked for hers
for generations.

Sophie Mol's father, Chacko, is a former Rhodes Scholar who met his
white ex-wife Margaret in England. He has not seen Sophie, now nine,
since shortly after her birth. Her adoptive father recently died, and
Margaret relents in the face of Chacko's pleas and secures airline
tickets to Kerala to get away from her grief.

The household is run by two witchy old women, a maid desperate to be
accepted by the family as a good Christian woman, and the twins' baby
grandaunt, Baby Kochamma. Baby Kochamma, bitter over having lost out
on the Catholic priest from her girlhood, to whom she still writes "I
love you" in a notebook each night, is hell-bent on making Ammu's life
miserable.

The novel, though, begins with none of this: it begins with a drifting,
divorced Rahel, returning home to Kerala as an adult, and rediscovering
the silent companionship she shares with her twin.

Ms. Roy then gracefully dips in and out of time, mingling images of a
decrepit Baby Kochamma addicted to satellite TV in the family's
now-dilapidated manor with explosively poetic tales of the past.

The twins - the chaotic, charming, precocious twins - are the seers and
knowers of everything that goes on in the house. Much of it is
revealed in the present-day, as adults come to grips with memories that
children should not have made.

The twins befriend Velutha and his crippled brother; the twins enchant
Sophie Mol during playtime. Estha is molested by a movie-theater snack
vendor, and Rahel feels the horrific ripples.

It is Sophie Mol's visit that is the catalyst for the series of tragic
events that sets up the family's downfall. However, the tension builds
with background information, namely Velutha's involvement in the
Communist movement in Kerala and the caste tension that all of the
characters swim in.

The series of events that cause the family to be shredded is something
like this: Ammu and Velutha become lovers. Velutha is betrayed by a
local political activist, Comrade Pillai, and nearly everyone else in
the story, because of his caste and his unwillingness to bend to their
desires. When Velutha and Ammu are caught together, his father
reports, like a dutiful serf, to her mother, who carps about honor and
spits in his face. Baby Kochamma, seeing an opportunity for revenge on
the willful Ammu, reports it to the police as a rape. Velutha is
horribly beaten, and threatened with imprisonment, Estha colludes,
identifying him as the assaulter.

This last, however, is after the twins, saddened that their mother
lashes out at them and tells them she wishes they'd never been born,
hop in the boat they've been fixing and row away across the river with
Sophie Mol. Only Sophie falls out of the boat and drowns, furthering
the family's grief.

From there, they are broken up: Rahel is sent to boarding school, Estha
to live with hisAmmu dies young, her energy and will to live
sapped. Rahel and Estha are not reunited until years later.

Roy's generous wordplay and lush, vivid imagery make the book, as do
the intertwined stories. The small details of life in South India give
the book an immensely strong sense of place

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