It is not easy reading, one that makes reading this book. But in an unforgettable experience through acute sensory perceptions, we enter a world where everything is different- colours, lights, sounds and smell intense enough to stun.
Set in India, Ayemenem towards the end of the Sixties: Ammu, the daughter of a senior official, leaves her husband, an alcoholic and violent, to return home with her two sons. But, according to Indian tradition, a divorced woman is devoid of any recognized position and more if this woman committed the mistake of falling in love with an unacceptable outcast, an untouchable, for her there will be no understanding or forgiveness.
The narrative begins when all this happened a long time ago and show the twins Rahel and Estha, now adults, returned to Ayemenem after other painful experiences. The timing of the novel are those of today but the process always moves the centre of the representation from the present to the distant and recent past, the characters of its history, that of its generation, its people, its land.
The novel has the epic character of the work since, the particular story of the family shows the rebuilding of its traditions, culture, literature, art, language, its customs and environments, their religions, their myths.
And also because of the situations, people tend to be presented by the meaning of signs, symbols of a destiny to them and they become actors in a drama that surpasses them, where they are transformed into "little things" in a universe composed from "large, impenetrable and inscrutable things."
The events are constantly torn between a real dimension, and a concrete ideal. They remain invisible hiding their identities with them, but, suggesting that they might have another course. And the idea of the infinite possibilities that life has to show, the aspects that may have a huge story, of solutions which can be incalculable. And is also the fact that man is so little, only that which lives, that happens, just as the case deserves.
A number of cases outside the human will is the life for Roy. There is a condition always possible to change because it follows the lines of the obscure. So in the book is created, indefinite atmospheres, somewhere between what happens and what might have occurred between the real and unreal presence, arcane and mysterious.
In this dynamism, which is outward and acts as a frame, is a story that has been presented early in the whole plot. In the final outcome, it becomes too busy as it passes continuously from present to past and from this to that future announced, makes every circumstance or character a reason to look back and projecting forward.
It’s a situation constantly mobile, which expands to infinity whenever that is going to shrink, then the player creates a constant state of expectation because the attention is continually distracted by the repeated, endless digressions and that the author does eventually transform the work in the representation of every aspect of life not only human but also animal, plant, each character not only of the eponymous family but the entire people of India, not only of each attribute of the times, places, environments , but the immediate events of all times, places, environments and events in India.
It dates back to the origins, the first culture and language, the early traditions, the early settlers, the spread of Christianity, its coexistence with other religions, customs that have accrued and which still persist, the social caste, the war’s, independence and you get to modern times, to Marxism, the trade union struggles on television, the consumer society, the crisis of moral values, corruption, false rulings.
A India, of its present, its past, its people, its forests, its rivers, its temples, its mysteries, its ghosts, its legends, its truth, its beliefs, poverty, all of life is in this book. The life bringing with them advancing past and present, men and things, which always ends and is renewed, which is a history of "great things" and grants to men only "small things” , which has itself the senses, the ultimate meaning and only those close to them. This movement is not inexhaustible and never dies down in a final truth or that form a final opinion.
At the end of the novel we realize that it has not come to a new or clear knowledge, but the revelation of life as a never-ending process that has preceded us and we will follow in obedience to her thanks to our rules. In this perspective, in the novel, the importance of the story is represented in the broad name which would be an expression of truth, eternity, and unpredictability of life.
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