The God Of Small Things Chapter 1 & 2

Let me just start off by saying that I was extremely confused by the start of this book. I can't really tell if the characters are male or female because their names all sound so similar to me. When the book starts off, it seems like so many characters are introduced and the backgrounds of these people are given. It is hard to keep all these people straight when you just hear a little about them and then it moves on to the next character.


As the book starts out, a person named Rahel, who is a woman coming back to her homeland of India. She is coming back to see her twin brother Estha and her mother Ammu. There was also a bigger part about Baby Kochamma which is her grand aunt. This part really confused me. I didn't know why they called Rahel's grand aunt a baby, or how that even worked. Rahel talks about how she and her twin brother used to be like one person, but they had grown apart over the years.

Rahel goes back to her old house and starts to remember familiar sights, sounds, and smells. She also remembers things that happened in her childhood, especially her cousin Sophie Mol's funeral. It says that Sophie drowned on a family trip to England or something like that. I think that this is going to come into play later in the novel, since this is the first thing that Rahel remembers when she comes back to her home. It also mentions how the title is starting to play into the book because Rahel noticed the "small things" at the funeral, like a bat crawling up Baby Kochamma's clothes and Sopie "screaming" as they buried her. It also says that this is the first time that the twins have seen each other in twenty three years, since the funeral.

I thought it was crazy that one little thing in the book mentioned about death said that thirty was viewed as an age old enough to die. In our culture, thirty is so young and that person would still have so much life left to live.

I think that I like Ammu so far. I liked that she did not listen to everything that her husband told her to do, like sleep with the man so her husband would not get fired. She seems like a strong and powerful woman, and I am excited to see what she does in throughout the story.

I'm not really sure what to think of the rest of the characters. No one seems to get along very well with one another. It seems like they are always arguing and fighting. I'm not really sure why, maybe a reason will be revealed later in the story??