by Manuel Gonzales

Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

I have seen whales. And...

They're smaller than you might think.

For two weeks, at the end of September, I basked in the soft glow of autumn, among red and gold trees, cloudy, misty mornings, and steaming bowls of clam chowder. The air was chill, and for two weeks, I forgot about the heat wave crashing, always crashing (even into November) through Austin. I drank Guinness, sat on the porch, and read. Every so often, I would dare the elements for a glimpse or two of a humpback, but, everfaithful, evervigilant, I would return, then, to my books and fried clams. I enjoyed the hospitality of Ms. M and her parents, wrassled with the dog, sat in the cozy warmth of their house, watched the leaves change before my very eyes, and read.

A more relaxed and relaxing vacation, I've never had.

And, I didn't get sea sick.

While there, on the porch glider, reading, I finished Arundhati Roy's first novel, God of Small Things. This one is walking off the shelves. Even without my help.

In a recent review of the novel, John Updike compared Roy's narrative devices, her ability to tell a story without ever telling you the story, to Faulkner's peeling-the-onion effect, no better documented than in his tour de force Absalom, Absalom! And so I join the two, and prove once and for all that the sum of two is in no way greater, and is sometimes far inferior, to the individual parts themselves.

Roy, for her part, writes with a child's eye, a wondrous, wide-eyed, wide-open prose. But her voice is no child's. Filled with Insight, Fear, Jealousy, and Love, hers is the voice of one who has seen lives destroyed and built up, only to be destroyed again.

A rolly-polly, (ain't no phony), love-me-only voice.

From the beginning, Roy tells you what will happen and what has happened. She reveals the past, thoughts and actions of her characters, subtly, with a word here, a phrase there. She uses repetition to develop rhythm, voice, poetry, but overall, to remind you of the scandalous tragedy that happened in Ayemenem almost thirty years before.

In 1969, Sophie Mol, visiting Ayemenem, died. We do not find out how or why until the end of the novel. Her name is mentioned, at first, in passing, along with her death. An out of the blue remark made with a child's flippancy, a child's mute ramblings. About free bus rides, about death, about the Government, who did not pay for Sophie Mol's funeral because Sophie Mol did not die on a zebra track.

Rahel and Estha, Sophie Mol's dizygotic twin cousins, are at the heart of the story. Rahel, at 31, finds herself back in India, her dreams lost long ago, her brother mute, her family's house a shambles, and her mind flooded with memories. Memories of a sky-blue Plymouth, of communism sweeping through Ayemenem, of her mother, her uncle, her Mammachi and Pappachi, the dark river which ran by her house, and of Sophie Mol's death.

Soon after Sophie Mol's death, Rahel and Estha were separated, Estha Returned to his father, Rahel left with her mother, whose sanity slowly slips through her toes and mixes with the muds of monsoon season. Roy picks up the story with Rahel coming home. Estha has been re-returned. Their mother dead, died at thirty-one. "Not old. Not young. But a viable, die-able age." Estha's voice lost, Rahel's mind empty. Together, they reconcile their pasts.

To write much more about Roy's powerful story would be to take away one of its finest features. Until the end, she holds us in suspense, keeping from us the true nature of her story. Keeps us from the scandal, building up the tension between Rahel and Estha, between their mother, Ammu, and their uncle Chacko, all building up to the arrival of their English cousin, leading us then to the fateful day of her death, telling us long before the end that Sophie Mol died, and hinting with every breath that a tragedy, a scandal even worse transpired.

She writes music on the page. Rhymes intermixed with anagrams and words spelled backwards, like a child's game. Words Capitalized As If Through A Child's Mind. Full of rhythm and meter, her story gets into your head like a tune to be hummed, refuses to quit, night and day.

Day and night, until you've finished the book, learned of the tragedy, satisfied the song in your head. Only to be played and re-played through your mind.

And though I'll grant Updike and other critics their accolades, Roy has much work yet to do. A stylist, yes, but her style has more than a hint of a conglomeration of styles, taking from such (good) influences as Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Faulkner and maybe even García Marquéz, so that her own voice comes through as a patchwork, not so much a single identity. A mix of realism, magical realism, history, religion, all those qualities which make a novel novel, yet with a little too much borrowing for my own tastes. But as she writes, she grows, and I have no doubts that soon her stories will sing with their own true voice, the voice of Arundhati Roy.

If you've never read Absalom, Absalom! (or any Faulkner, for that matter), one word of advice: expect, at every turn, for Faulkner to try his damnedest to make you stop reading his novel. From the first sentence of Absalom, Absalom! ("From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which..." on and on and on, and that's not even half the sentence), to the very last scenes of the novel, Faulkner, through language, characterization, description, will try and make you stop reading the novel, just as one of his main characters, Quentin, will try to stop listening to the story, the tragic story of Thomas Sutpen and his failed dynasty, told to him by Rosa Coldfield, his father, and his college roommate. But you must press on. At every obstacle, you must press on.

Absalom, Absalom! is a story of one man, Thomas Sutpen, who came to Yoknapatawpha County (Faulkner's mythical county in Mississippi), unknown, untrusted and untrustworthy, and tried to begin a family. He merely wanted respectability, a wife, a home, and a son to carry his name. The story then turns into a gothic portrayal of the South, of southern dynasties, Quentin Compson caught in the middle, listening to tales of woe, betrayal, and destruction, as Sutpen's tragedy unfolds before him.

Faulkner is a master storyteller. He weaves his readers in and out of one narrative to throw them into the next, never once telling us which narrator to believe. Never allowing us the satisfaction of knowing why Sutpen moved to Jefferson, Mississippi in the first place, why everything around him falls to ruin, why his ghost haunts Jefferson still. Half of the story, half of the novel is suspect, told by Quentin and his college roommate (neither of whom know the truth, and who are making up the story to fit what they think might have happened, had to have happened, should have happened).

And like Roy, Faulkner tells us the whole story (real and imagined) before we even know the story is happening, with references, repetitions, and monologues. Even only a few pages into the first chapter, we are hit with vague ambiguities, "[T]he son who had widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride," all very Faulkner in tone, and his tone continues to the last dying breath.

A story of forbidden love, of past tragedies, of ghosts haunting living and dead, Absalom, Absalom! takes us into the heart of Faulkner's a tragicomic South, his response to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind plantations and southern belle illusions.

About these two writers, Faulkner and Roy, there is nothing simple. They both explore nontraditional levels of narration and suspense, and at the center of their tales is defiance: of traditions, of the past, and of the ghosts of the past.

Neither of their stories are soon forgotten.

The Lost Generation

Here are some titles not reviewed, but well worth reading. If you too know of titles worth reading, send them along to the Austin Downtown Arts offices.

Years With Ross

This nonfiction work by James Thurber recounts in a series of essays the life and times of one Harold Ross, founder and editor-in-chief of the famed New Yorker magazine. As Dorothy Parker once wrote, "Only God or James Thurber could have invented Ross." Thurber's essays are at once telling and hilarious, as he paints Ross's portrait like no other writer could.

I, Fellini

Is it autobiography or biography? Written by Charlotte Chandler, but written in first person, through the eyes of Fellini, from the lips of Fellini, this book acts as both biography and autobiography. Chandler, asked to write I, Fellini by Fellini himself, spent months, days, years, lots of time with Fellini and worked with him to produce an excellent, if somewhat hodge-podgy, work on Fellini's life, his thoughts, his dreams, etc.

The Remains of the Day

I know everyone and their grandmother has seen this movie. But read the book. Ishiguro won the famed Booker Prize for this short novel, and he writes with the dignity of a long-standing English butler. The narrator's voice is clear and true to character, and the novel's structure makes it a pleasant, intriguing, often comedic read.

Angela´s Ashes

I know I listed this one last. I know you've probably already gone out and bought the other books listed first and already have your hands full with God of Small Things and Absalom, Absalom! But I'll tell you this in all honesty: put down whatever else you are reading and pick up Angela's Ashes. The Irish, my friends, are true writers.