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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. A sort of mix of recent-historical and contemporary fiction. It is funny and tragic, beautiful and ugly, perfectly written and appallingly overwritten - sometimes all in the one chapter. Or so it seemed to me. The writing is highly stylized and much of the time it fits perfectly, but at others it irritated me. The early chapters made me think of John Irving, with that ability show the humour and absurdity in what seems inevitable human tragedy, but the humour faded, turning at times to farce before becoming something (intentionally?) cringeworthy. The multiple timelines slowly get more entangled, although this at least I found a convincingly portrayal of what I felt the twins going through. The ending, when it comes, offers little more than a settling but somehow unwelcome (and possibly unnecessary) clarification of the imagery built up through the book. And after that ending I am at a loss to know what I really think of the book beyond it being both awful and brilliant.
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