It is a story about our contemporary world, of India, and Pakistan, delivered through the microcosm of individuals living through the never ending and harrowing conflict in Kashmir, and the fringe communities of outsiders in Delhi. This is a novel that captures the life that Arundhati Roy has lived and the issues that have consumed her since the publication of her groundbreaking The God of Small Things. I feel like The God of Small Things is going to be on my TBR a lot longer.īlog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube It even feels disjointed, almost like a collection of short stories rather than a novel. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's also not the kind of book I enjoy reading. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a book without a plot that simply explores the perspectives, past and present, of many characters. When it finally came back to the main issues, it took me a while to get back on track. The book constantly has a foot in several tangents about spiritual anecdotes, diatribes, history lessons and various monologues, each of which went on far too long. Not only is there a sea of forgettable characters, but the book zips quickly between past and present, third and first person, with almost no dialogue to separate the huge paragraphs of dense description. It feels deliberately intellectual and lacking in personality.

The book is just very difficult to enjoy. It is set across the span of many years, through the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but these times of tremendous upheaval and horror were narrated coldly. However, there is a confusing mess of characters introduced throughout the book and I found it hard to warm to anyone. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness essentially follows two main characters in South Asia - Tilo and Anjum - the former is dragged into the center of an independence movement, while the latter is intersex and living among ghosts.

A reader who puts beautiful, complex writing over plot and emotional pull a reader who doesn't mind looking back over almost 500 pages and realizing very little has happened, even if it was told with pretty language. These kind of books have a special place in the heart of a certain type of reader. It took me a couple hundred pages of squinting hard to see the truth: there is no story. Perhaps it was a mistake to put it off and opt for Roy's newer release instead, but all I can say is my expectations have significantly lowered after reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.Īt first, I thought the story was slow, dense and hard to follow. It's been on my mental longlist of books to read since before Goodreads existed. I, like many people, have heard of the success of Roy's The God of Small Things from twenty years ago.

The utmost happiness