“Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End.” 

With signature stylistic flourish, the narrator suggests how far apart the twins have become shortly before their reunion after close to 25 years. The passage suggests the novel’s inventive use of language: the capitalization, the listing device, the fragments, the unsettling simile of the trolls, and the blurring of the sensual and the abstract.

“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.” 

Here the narrator suggests the closeness of these fraternal twins: Rahel the Empty, Estha the Quiet. In their adult response to the events of Christmas 1969, they have opted for radically different strategies that are similar only in that they measure how entirely bound they both are to a past they cannot change. The suggestive simile of two lovers, however, foreshadows the closing taboo sexual encounter between the brother and sister.

“To understand history […] we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.” 

For the pseudo-intellectual Chacko, too eager to impose communism on the factory work force, too eager, that is, to control and direct history’s unfolding kinetics, here he espouses what for him is a Big Idea: Learn from the past. However, that approach, as the novel reveals, is a strategy for getting lost in history. The novel brings the world of 1969 to immediacy through just such a strategy as a way to suggest how the past haunts the present.