For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.” Perhaps that is what she is doing through this novel and that is why it is fragmented – like a dance trying to make sense of the world and as chaotic as the characters’ experiences: “They continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts defying gravity”. In an interview with the Guardian, Arundhati Roy said: “To me there is nothing higher than fiction. This is dissimilar to Arundhati Roy’s first book, The God of Small Things, which although touches on many of the same themes, felt to me much more contained, focussing on a family. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a complex and exhausting novel, covering a great deal of time, characters and historical information, often breaking away from the storyline to describe the physical and political landscape. Though, I don’t think that was only due to the experience of listening to a book rather than visually seeing words on a page. It felt almost like cheating! It was a very different experience and I found it quite difficult to follow the plot. So, instead of reading, I listened to this one as an audiobook. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |