Photo: The Australian.
In our life there is always a special book, see why we discovered it at a specific and defining moment of our existence, because its story connects with us like no other, because it makes us travel and embrace the unknown. In my case, that book is The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, which reported the Booker Award for author in 1997, sold more than 8 million copies and was translated in 42 languages. Twenty years later, but without leaving India, Roy publishes his new book, The Ministry of Ultimate Happiness.
Arundhati Roy: urgency and eternity
Although Arundhati Roy took four years to write her first novel (1992 - 1996), more than once she has been heard to say that she had actually been writing it all her life. Because despite the magical realism and exoticism that seduced the West, The God of Small Things is above all the daily portrait of a Syrian-Christian family from the tropical state of Kerala through which the author pays tribute to her own experiences, although this It will take 35 years of waiting. And it is now, 20 after so many awards and successes, when we have news of new material of which it is one of India's most famous (and conscientious) authors.
And it is that during the last 20 years Roy has lived immersed in other parallel projects, especially activists: the denunciation of the nuclear tests carried out by the Indian government in the state of Rajasthan (which led to The End of Imagination, one of his many essays), documentaries about the Maoist guerrillas, denunciations of Hindu nationalism, the defense of women's rights in a country as unequal as his and even statements about a dark side of Gandhi that raised blisters among the most conservative sectors of India. But no one, not even her literary agent, smelled that a new novel was beginning to cook in the author's mind.
"I don't know when I started writing it, I mean, it's something very esoteric," Roy confirmed to The Guardian recently, although at all times he was clear that "he did not want a The God of Little Things 2"
Arundhati Roy's new book, The Ministry of Ultimate Happiness, delves into the world of daughters, those considered as people of the third sex, formerly adored for their status as advisers to great kings but currently repressed in an Indian subcontinent where LGBT rights are not fully established. The protagonist, Anjum, is a transgender woman who, after living in a community of hijras in the midst of poverty in Old Delhi, decides to settle in a cemetery and begin the beginning of an accommodation there where all the minorities of India fit: from others transgender people to those known as untouchables, the lowest echelon of the well-known caste system of the Asian country, giving rise to a gallery of colorful and extravagant characters that reflects Roy's interests and his love for India, that country that represents for her « a stream of solidarity ».
Twenty years later, Arundhati Roy's second novel will be published on June 6, while it will arrive in Spain in October from Anagrama. Two decades that lead to the question that the autoa will hear the most in the coming months: Why so much non-fiction book and all this time for a new novel?
"Because the difference between non-fiction and fiction is that the first calls for urgency, and the second eternity," Roy will tell him.