arundhati roy book the ministry of utmost happiness

Yet its complexity feels essential to Roy's vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world.

Outlining What We Can and Can’t Know Follow Us Books When I Write Fiction, I’m. Sweeping, intricate, and sometimes densely topical, the novel can be a challenging read. An interview with Arundhati Roy, whose novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades. Shifting fluidly between moods and time frames, Roy juxtaposes first-person and omniscient narration with 'found' documents to weave her characters' stories with India's social and political tensions, particularly the violent retaliations to Kashmir's long fight for self-rule. When an abandoned infant girl appears mysteriously amid urban litter and both Anjum and Tilo have reasons to try to claim her, all their lives converge. Tilottama, fascinates three very different men but loves only one, the elusive Kashmiri activist Musa Yeswi. One day, Anjum finds an abandoned baby outside of a mosque and decides to take her home, naming her Zainab. One follows Anjum, a hijra, or transwoman, struggling to make a life for herself in Delhi. She is beautiful and has an aggressive femininity. The other protagonist, the woman who calls herself S. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, hulking, sprawling story that it is, has two main strands. The dwelling she cobbles together on her family's graves becomes a paradoxically life-affirming enclave for the wounded, outcast, and odd. Embracing her identity as a woman, she moves from her childhood home in Delhi to the nearby House of Dreams, where hijra like herself live together, and then to a cemetery when that home too fails her. Anjum, one of its two protagonists, is born intersex and raised as a male.

Appearing two decades after 1997's celebrated The God of Small Things, Roy's ambitious, original, and haunting second novel fuses tenderness and brutality, mythic resonance and the stuff of front-page headlines.

Arundhati roy book the ministry of utmost happiness