22. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I read this just this year (2007) as I'm also working through the Year 12 English Studies reading list. I pity any student who has to tackle this. I quite liked the setting - India - for its mystic exoticism but I found the pacing to be terribly slow. It must infuriate students who have to re-read it! It's got an interesting structure - the narrative shifts from the perspective of the main protagonists' - a pair of fraternal twins - childhood and subsequent reunion as adults. What I did love was the incidental tangents. One of the characters would notice a photograph on a parlour wall for instance and the narrative would depart from the "current" and explore the history of the person pictured. I love family sagas and histories so that appeals but overall, I wasn't enthralled and was pretty ready to finish this novel too.