The God of small things - Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

 

[ Booker winning prize ]

Introduction about author and booker prize : 

The God of Small Things” is a novel written by the famous write Arundhati Roy. This was her first novel and has won the Booker prize in London 1997. This novel depicts about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins, whose lives were destroyed by the Love Laws, wherein it speaks about who should be loved and in what proportion. The novel depicts of how small things in life, affect people’s lives and behavior.

 

Arundhati Roy was awarded the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. The award carried a prize of about US$30,000 and a citation that noted, "The book keeps all the promises that it makes".Prior to this, she won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989, for the screenplay of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, in which she captured the anguish among the students prevailing in professional institutions.In 2015, she returned the national award in protest against religious intolerance and the growing violence by rightwing groups in India.

In 2002, she won the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award for her work "about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world's most powerful governments and corporations", in order "to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity".

In 2003, she was awarded "special recognition" as a Woman of Peace at the Global Exchange Human Rights Awards in San Francisco with Bianca Jagger, Barbara Lee, and Kathy Kelly.

Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence.

In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India's Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it "in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by 'violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation'".

In November 2011, she was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing.

About Novel : -

The story begins twenty-three years after the main events which will be covered by the novel, with flashbacks to that earlier period which culminated in the funeral of Sophie Mol. References to the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and the death of Sophie Mol will be explained later in the novel.

The novel presents three generations of women.  It can be called the story of sufferings of Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, Ammu and Rahel.  They all suffer in different ways.  In a country like India where patriarchal system is very strong, women suffer mentally, physically and sexually.
The story revolves in a small town named Ayemenem, now a part of Kottayam in Kerala. The story speaks about two fraternal twins Rahel and Estha from their age of 7 in 1969 till they reunite when they turn to be 31 in 1993. Most of the story is written at the viewpoint of the seven year olds. In this novel, she has captured the caste system, communism and the Syrian Christian life in Kerala.
The novel begins with the story of a lady who desperately wants to get away from her ill-tempered father and finally she gets away to stay with her aunt in Calcutta and there she marries a man, who assists in the tea estate. But her marriage was unsuccessful and she returns home with her twin children, Estha and Rahel . On her return, apart from her mother and brother, they have their aunt who is her father’s sister staying with them. Ammu`s brother gets married to an English women whom he fell in love with at college and they have a daughter named Sophie. The novel revolves around these characters and the life they live and disaster that follow in their lives.

The Mill on the Floss By George Eliot : -

The Mill on the Floss By George Eliot : -



The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot  this novel, Eliot had published a book of short stories, the excitingly titled Scenes From a Clerical Life, and the novel Adam Bede. The Mill on the Floss was very successful and helped George Eliot achieve even greater fame.



The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot's second novel and her most autobiographical work of fiction. It tells the story of Maggie Tulliver, detailing her relationship with her brother Tom and her inability to conform to the rigidly traditional society in which she lives. Commentary on The Mill on the Floss has focused on its conclusion—which many critics consider abrupt—and on its complex characterizations and sociological insights.



In its portrayal of the childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood of Maggie Tulliver, The Mill on the Floss is closely identified with Eliot herself—intellectually gifted, impulsive and passionate by nature, and living in a familial and social setting that did not value these qualities in her. In particular, her focus on her protagonist's relationship with a beloved but tyrannical and disapproving older brother closely mirrors Eliot's own relationship with her brother: Maggie and Tom Tulliver are given the same birthdates as Eliot and her brother, who for twenty years spurned Eliot while she lived with the married philosopher and essayist George Henry Lewes. It was not until Lewes died and Eliot married that the rift with her brother was mended. Maggie's need for Tom's love and acceptance has often been compared to Eliot's desire for her brother's acceptance; Barbara Hardy asserts: "As she dwells on the relationship between a brother and sister we can discern an understandable and undisfiguring nostalgia; a need to explain and justify in concretely imagined terms; and the falsifying pressures of a wish-fulfilling reconciliation."



Plot and Major Characters about book



Written in seven books, The Mill on the Floss chronicles Maggie and Tom Tulliver's lives from childhood to young adulthood. Books I and II concentrate on Maggie's childhood, establishing her impulsive temperament and her dependence on Tom. Eliot recounts several episodes between brother and sister, and, as John Hagan has noted, "in nearly every one … there emerges a sequence of actions which dramatizes Maggie's hunger for Tom's love, the frustration of that hunger, her rebellion, and the pleasure she receives from reconciliation." This section has been described as one of the most sympathetic and psychologically acute literary portrayals of girlhood in English literature. In the following books, the Tulliver family becomes impoverished and Maggie grows increasingly estranged from her father and brother. She becomes involved with the son of the man who bankrupted her father, and is also attracted to another man who is engaged to marry her cousin. On learning of these relationships, Tom turns Maggie out of his house and refuses to speak to her. Maggie's subsequent life is spent in service as a governess and in struggle with temptation and self-renunciation. As George Levine has noted, she ultimately submits herself "to the higher responsibility despite the loss of the possibility of self-fulfillment." Just as she offers up a prayer to the "Unseen Pity," the river begins to rise, and she sees Tom being swept away by the flood. Maggie rushes to Tom's rescue, and they drown in each other's arms, fulfilling the novel's epitaph, "In death they were not divided."



Major Themes of the book:



Critics assert that Maggie's need for love and acceptance is her underlying motivation throughout The Mill on the Floss, and the conflicts that arise in the novel often stem from her frustrated attempts at gaining this acceptance. Alan Bellringer has commented, "The two main themes of the novel, growing up and falling in love, lend themselves to amusement, but it is stunted growth and frustrated love that are emphasized." Commentators have often focused on the constant rejection of Maggie's talents and mannerisms by her family and society. Even the cultural norms of her community deny her intellectual and spiritual growth, according to Elizabeth Ermarth, "They are norms according to which she is an inferior, dependent creature who will never go far in anything, and which consequently are a denial of her full humanity."



Critical Reception of the book :
Commentators have varied in their analyses of The Mill on the Floss. Many critics concur with U. C. Knoepflmacher's assessment of the novel's conclusion as "at best pathetic, for it asks us to believe that the muddy waters of the Floss have briefly restored an Eden that never existed," but others defend the ending as appropriate and inevitable, consistent with the details of the plot and the novel's themes. The autobiographical nature of The Mill on the Floss has been deemed aesthetically damaging by some critics because, they charge, it led Eliot to place disproportionate emphasis on the first two books. However, Bernard J. Paris contends "that the novel's weaknesses are closely related to its strengths, for if George Eliot had not been so intimately identified with Maggie she could hardly have given us a portrait of such subtlety and interest." Critics consistently praise Eliot's touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver's childhood; the novelist Henry James stated in an early review of the novel, "English novels abound in pictures of childhood; but I know of none more truthful and touching than the early pages of this work."

Charlie and the choclate factory

Charlie and the chocolate factory



Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children book by British author Rolad Dahl. The story features the adventures of young charlie Bucket inside the choclate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka .
In this book so many characters are there like :
- [Charlie Bucket, Willy wonka , The oompa – loompas , GrandpaJoe , Augustus gloop , Veruca salt,
Violet Beauregrade, Mike Teavee , Mr. Bucket, Mrs Bucket , Grandma Josephine , Grandpa
Ggeorge , Grandma Georgina.]



About Story :



Charlie, a young boy from an impoverished family, and four other kids win a tour of an amazing chocolate factory run by an imaginative chocolate, Willy Wonka, and his staff of Oompa-Loompas.
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” represents a fun children novel with many modern fairytale characteristics. There are many surreal elements in this book and as in any other fairytale nobility and kindness are rewarded.
In the center of the story are Charlie and 4 other kids who represent the worse human flaws. Veruca Salt is a spoiled rich girl whose parents make her every wish come true. August Gloop is an obese boy that eats everything and that almost cost him his life because he nearly drowned in chocolate. Mike is a boy who always watches TV.
The complete opposite is Charlie whose family is barely making a living but they always manage to surprise him for his birthday.

It's the story of an ordinary boy named Charlie Bucket. He was no stronger or faster than anyone else, his family was not rich, powerful or well connected but he was the luckiest boy in the entire world, he just didn't know it yet.

15 years ago, Willy Wonka opened the largest chocolate factory in the world but spies stole his recipes so he closed the factory. It didn't close forever though, and suddenly he decided to allow 5 children to visit the factory and one of them will win a special prize at the end.

The children have to find one of the five golden tickets hidden beneath the ordinary wrapping paper of five ordinary Wonka bars. So, Augustus Gloop (a German chocoholic), Verruca Salt (a spoilt English brat), Violet Beauregarde (junior bubblegum champion), Mike Teavee (who hates chocolate) and Charlie Bucket (the luckiest boy in the entire world) win tickets and visit the factory.

"Accidents" happen while on the guided tour. The greedy Augustus falls in the chocolate lake and gets accidentally sucked up and taken away to the room where they make the most delicious kind of strawberry flavoured chocolate coated fudge.

Violet, ignoring Wonka's advice, tries some of his three course dinner gum and swells up like a blueberry. Verruca tries to grab a squirrel and ends up falling down the garbage chute in the direction of the incinerator Mike tries to use Wonka's chocolate teleport machine and ends up shrunk to about 6 inches high.

Charlie wins the prize - it's Willy Wonka's factory. Charlie would have to move the factory and never see his family again. He declines Wonka's offer. However, after Wonka is encouraged to make contact with his estranged father, he realises how important family can be, so he invites Charlie's entire family to move into the factory together.

so, The moral of the story is that kindness always wins. The reader sees the main problems of the modern society such as unhealthy eating and people becoming couch potatoes. As any other fairytale, this one also has a happy ending.