She writes about the lives of the lowest and the most successful with equal detail. It’s a long and intricate description, and the book is full of overly long descriptions at 445 pages, but Roy is giving respectful space to all the characters in her book, as, I think, she would like all people to be treated. She wasn’t beautiful in the way that Bombay silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be. She had a strong, chiseled face and an impressive, hooked nose like her father’s. Her hair would never grow very long, but it was long enough to pull back and weave into a plait of false hair. She had her nose pierced and wore an elaborate, stone-studded nose-pin, outlined her eyes with kohl and blue eye shadow and gave herself a luscious, bow-shaped Madhubala mouth of glossy red lipstick. Once she became a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, Anjum was finally able to dress in the clothes she longed to wear – the sequined, gossamer kurtas and pleated Patiala salwars, shararas, ghararas, silver anklets, glass bangles and dangling earrings. She leaves her parents’ home and lives in a house with other hijras:
In the first half of the book Anjum, born Aftab, is a hermaphrodite until she undergoes surgery.
There are two main characters, Anjum and Tilo, whose stories we follow among a cast of thousands. These years of political action have found a fictional outlet in this new work. In the intervening 20 years Roy has been very active politically and has written eight non-fiction books - about the caste system in India, about dams being built and displacing the poor, and the fight for independence in Kashmir, among other topics. Her first, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997 and this one was longlisted last year. This is Arundhati Roy’s second novel in 20 years. Roy shows a deft hand when writing about the lives of the lowest and the most successful with equal detail. ARUNDHATI ROY The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
0 kommentar(er)
