In the house seems to be great-aunt Baby Kochamma's new television set - in front of which she and her servant sit day after day, munching peanuts. To Ayemenem House, her former home in the south Indian state of Kerala, its elegant windows are coated with filth and its brass doorknobs dulled with grease dead insects lie in the bottom of its empty vases. This ambitious meditation on the decline and fall of an Indian family is part political fable, part psychological drama, part fairy tale, and it begins at its chronological end, in a landscape of extravagant ruin. Narration is so extraordinary - at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple - that the reader remains enthralled all the way through to its agonizing finish. Of a family grieving around a drowned child's coffin, there are plenty of other intimate horrors still to come, and they compete for the reader's sympathy with the furious energy of cats in a sack. Although ''The God of Small Things'' opens with memories Here is no single tragedy at the heart of Arundhati Roy's devastating first novel. A Silver Thimble in Her Fist By ALICE TRUAXĪ child's drowning is one of the tragedies in this novel about a prosperous Indian family's ruin
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