[lbo-talk] Arundhati Roy

Dennis Redmond metalslorg at gmail.com
Mon Jun 6 06:55:52 PDT 2011


On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 12:15 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> I think she's only written one novel: "God of Small Things" -- and
> really what's surprising about it is how soulless it was.

"God of Small Things" is a wondrous novel, and hides some sophisticated politics and critique of the Indian postcolonial state behind simple details (example: the History House). She's going against the grain of the slew of openly neoliberal, Anglophone writers and artists in South Asia who started to appear in the early 1990s, and have become the hegemonic force in South Asia's culture-industries.

Arundhati Roy has her limitations, sure, including a penchant for nostalgic moralizing for a Gandhiism which never really existed that way in the first place, but she does the research on the social movements she works with, and has great stylistic skills. Her scathing denunciations of that crime against humanity otherwise known as Operation Greenhunt have been outstanding.

-- DRR



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