the ministry of utmost happiness sparknotes

There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest.”Ĭredit. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. As Roy describes one preoccupied character’s writing habits: “She wrote strange things down. This makes for an ambitious but highly discursive novel that eventually builds to a moving conclusion but bogs down, badly, in the middle, and is sometimes so lacking in centripetal force that it threatens to fly apart into pieces. Her long-awaited new novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” has moments of similar heartfelt intensity, but it is less focused on the personal and the private than on “the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.” In that earlier novel, Roy focused on personal and private losses, using her magical eye for emotional detail and her quicksilver prose to immerse us in the daily rhythms of life in a Kerala village, while creating a Faulknerian portrait of a family that had the inevitability of a classic tragedy. Naipaul once called “poverty and an abjectness too fearful to imagine.” The barbarities of history: the bloody politics of colonialism and partition, shockingly violent outbreaks of religious strife, paralyzing caste and class prejudices, and what V. In “ The God of Small Things,” her stunning debut novel, published 20 years ago, Arundhati Roy wrote that in India, “ personal despair could never be desperate enough” because “Worse Things had happened” and would keep happening. THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS By Arundhati Roy 449 pages.

The ministry of utmost happiness sparknotes