San Juan College Library

Arundhati Roy continues writing of death as a fulfillment of life's journey for the dead, but an "unanchoring" for the living, in "Mother Mary Comes To Me." She's got such a confident voice that leads the reader to explore. Make connections, expected and unexpected. Make it personal. Enjoy it all.

Ernest Hemingway said that every man has two deaths: when he is buried in the ground, and the last time someone says his name. But Carl Sagan would say that our atoms are forever. We exist, forever, in a different form.

Baby Kochamma realizes that she holds Father Mulligan in her memory and so has not lost him. So why doesn't she take the same road with Velutha, Ammu, or Sophie Mol? Death is an endpoint on a linear timeline - but linear timelines are colonialist. Roy uses nonlinear storytelling for this reason.

The real tragedy is not death, but in how we wall ourselves off from the living and allow grief to create disconnection. In Roy, a fly or a shark or a frog or a sparrow die just as lonely, just as pointlessly, as humans.

Maybe Roy intended these leaps, and maybe she didn't. But that's what "The God of Small Things" is about, in part: We call death a tragedy because we observe it, we intellectualize it, we try to rule it, we try to silence it.

But death is ultimately, and simply, an unavoidable fact of life.

To be a small thing is to be intimately connected, though unaware, of life and death. Humans have the ability to distance ourselves from the everyday drama of small things. And therefore we exist in a state of understanding and not understanding.

Take it even further beyond Roy's intent: Botanically, fruit is dying. Scientifically, though we associate fruit with vitality and health, the bluebottles are correct: fruit is a symbol of death. Still life paintings like van der Ast's are not just pretty pictures. They're commentary on this.

But it's not silly to bring up van der Ast in analysis, either. Fruit and death are common contrasts in art. We could also bring up the associations in Christianity and Greek mythology between fruit and death: Persephone. The Garden of Eden. Fruit is a temptation to mortality.

These Lush 17th-Century Paintings Were Striking Reminders of Mortality In 17th-century Europe, paintings known as vanitas were created to emphasize the transience of life and the futility of earthly pleasure.

Roy juxtaposes fresh, aromatic fruit with flies who become attracted by the smell, and then kill themselves flying against the window in their stupor. Freshness and decay. Life and death.

Is this a conscious reference to van der Ast's Fruit Basket (1632)? No, that's silly.

So in Roy's paragraph, did she intend for "dustgreen" to be a compound word because it echoes the use of "bluebottle" later on? Maybe. She does like compound words. It's anticolonialist, which she explicitly promotes.

Example: "The red curtains hung heavy in the room, locking in the smell of decay floating from the corpse on the floor." Okay, so the writer says the curtains are red because they were in real life. But the editor left that detail in because readers connect to red symbolically.

A book is a collaborative effort. In editing, we look over a manuscript. Patterns and symbolism naturally emerge. We debate about whether to strike a word, phrase, paragraph, even a whole chapter if it does not serve a story.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a librarian, I believe all schools of literary analysis are correct in their own way.

(Except postmodernism, which is a cognitohazard, and proves that PhDs invented brainrot.)

(I'm kidding. I even like postmodernism.)

(Please don't put me on a blocklist for that.)

At the other end of this is the "Death of the Author" school of thought: that the author's perceptions of their own work don't matter at all. Literature is more about how it is received than how it is written.

Authors may get quite testy and dismissive, even contemptuous, when literature professors teach students to analyze their works. "When I described the curtains in the murder scene as red, it's because the curtains were red, and nothing else!"

🧵(long) (sorry not sorry) A common criticism of literary analysis is that authors may not necessarily intend all the meanings and deft touches that are ascribed to them. Kerouac said he did not subconsciously place symbolism in his work. Updike claimed there was no method to writing fiction. Etc.

The opening paragraph of Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things. It reads: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, flatly baffled in the sun.

📚 You could compose a full creative writing class on the opening paragraph of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

(The candy is a bookrest and also the standard reward for talking to a reference librarian.)

A screenshot of a Zotero library

The SJC Library is closed for MLK Jr. Day. One of our librarians is still working remotely, cleaning up tags and other metadata in a global collaborative AI database. Just one of the many library tasks patrons never get to see…

Review stating “I dont no what is so special about librarys. If you go inside you’re going to find the same thing. you go into the place and they’re are books stacked from the floor to the sealing. I really think this money could been used for something more better. who care about book when internet”

Snowfall total: 8 inches! For Wisconsin, no big deal; for a place that might get 8 inches a YEAR, very big deal!

For your meme pleasure - my autocorrect needs therapy after putting in the alt text. Best review I've seen. who care about book when internet

We are CLOSED today due to… snow?! And a lot of it? This is a confusing time for us. We saw this in a book once…

A speaker in a room.

Attending the Daughters of the American Revolution meeting this month. DAR is one of the many groups we reach out to in the Four Corners. We’ve even written custom booklets and delivered programs for DAR!

No worries! I appreciate all the work you do for this!

Just started our official library account! Administrator is @libraryjenn.bsky.social

📚Did you know that you can change your sound preferences on LibChat? We have changed all our chat sounds to a clown horn. It's delightful.