Jan 19, 2007 3
been a while
i’d like to move to an island in the mediterranean and listen to dancehall all the time.
reminiscing about childhood with friends, whether shared or not, evokes a kind of nostalgia that doubly saddens me and fills me with elation – an elation that provokes my mouth to offer ridiculous story after story.
i think it was brought on by the novel i’ve been devouring, the god of small things by arundhati roy.
it is a novel that manages, in an ‘adult’ language, to put you in a position to remember your childhood’s perspective as it obeyed time at a time when time seemed invisible and space when space was as yet undiscovered in a way you hadn’t before. why, as adults, are children’s behaviours regarded as completely absurd? given the parameters within which they operate – the shelter, the entertainment, the height disadvantage (this is a big one, mind the pun), the relentless curiousity, the training wheels on oversized yellow bmx bikes, the running shoes with velcro straps and pre-rabbit-and-tree related shoelace tying mantras, the boring “life-lesson” board games from the welfare office, the desert hedgehog meandering in the sandy alleys formed between houses … – IF you can really really shrink down long enough to remember how big everything actually is, absurd becomes default, normal, matter-of-fact, would shed light on the absurdity of adulthood. roy does this. she sets out with her third-person omniscient narration to temporally dole out information in chronologically disordered chunks, forcing the reader to either care enough to fill in blanks or drop the book altogether. the lack of any clear objectivity, the repetition and wordplay, the calculated capitalizations, and the smattering of seemingly random metaphors all work together set the melancholic tone of the novel, filling the reader with a sense of fatal, but equally unimportant, anticipation. it’s as if recounting the story is a tedious exercise. as if the narrator is re-visiting a past history for the sake of others already aware of the ‘finality’ of events, but prodding more and more for minute details.
here’s my favourite excerpt from the book:
He was exasperated because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happend when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the comfirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.
