Arundhati Roy on requests to adapt The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Not a novel that wants to be a film

New Delhi: Author Arundhati Roy has said her second book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not a novel which is to be made into a movie. With The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy has marked her return to the world of literary fiction this year, after a gap of two decades. Roy, who received The Man Booker Prize in 1997 for her first book The God of Small Things, was speaking at the Penguin Fever organised by Penguin Random House India to mark 30 years of the publishing house, in the India Habitat Centre on 26 October in New Delhi. [caption id=“attachment_4181719” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (left); Arundhati Roy (right). Images via Facebook[/caption] “It is not a novel that wants to be an essay, it is not a novel that wants to be a film, All it wants to be is a novel. I wanted to write something about the air we breathe and the air we breathe has caste, gender, Kashmir, love, animal and cities and everything. The book reflects so,” the writer said. “When I started writing God of Small Things, somewhere in my mind I had set up it as stubbornly visual. It is very visual but I don’t think it will either make a great film,” she said. “A lot of Hollywood film-makers wanted to buy the rights of the book. My agents back there would say ‘Look Arundhati, they are willing to give you anything you want, but I would say no’,” she noted. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness had failed to make it to the shortlist of six books for The Man Booker Prize (Fiction) 2017. Her novel was considered among the top competitors in the race and was earlier described as a “significant” work of fiction. Widely hailed by international critics, Roy’s novel was thought to be a sure-name in the shortlist.