of things which are small and quiet

Another review, I haven't read anything since the last one, I must confess that I've been renewing the same volume since May, disgusting but true. I just received this in the mail,
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
and as the title promised, it speaks to childhood memories of confusion and wordless reverie, I've only read the first chapter but it's telling me about emptiness and silence and the reasons for them, darkest patches of a child's soul buried underneath years of reflective habit.
Other than that, the writing style is startling, flooded with imgaes of nature, bright, lurid memories. And it is set in India, country of my dreams, maybe all dreams. She sees the biggest thing in the small things. And she understands why I start all my stories with "There was never anything that could be said to describe..." or "No one could tell..." or "Nothing ever happened to change..."

here are excerpts. They are long because they were so full. THIS IS NOT MY WRITING. It is Arundhati Roy's. And if it makes you read her book, then that's good, but if it gives you just a taste of what touched me at the bottom of the well, then that's something too, and you are closer to thinking you understand me.

"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or the day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world.
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. ...

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. ...
But when they made love [Larry] was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully....
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rachel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies. ...
In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.... Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago... in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much."

And I finished the chapter, and then I cried, and then I slept. And I'm still working on how this is true, and why it's been hidden so beautifully.