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Title: The Inheritance of Loss
ISBN: 0802142818
Author:
Kiran Desai
Publicate Date: 2006-08-29
Publish: 2006-08-29
List Price: $14.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $1.99
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.47
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.20
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1: Compassionate but brutally honest
How much the world can humiliate a person, turning him inward to self-hatred and destruction. This novel is a sad and exhilarating book to read, the paradoxical nature of living and the human mind is lovingly described in nuanced details, sometimes comical, sometimes tragic, but always brutally honest. Perhaps even love is not the answer, but compassion, forgiveness, of one self and others.
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2: "How could Indians travel in the world and live in the world the same way Westerners did?"
Interwoven through the 350 pages of Krian Desai's graceful, bleak, nearly perfect novel are three tragicomedies (or, some might insist, comic tragedies), all measuring the humiliations of imperialism and dispossession, racial and ethnic strife, and political and religious fundamentalism. There is the story of the orphan girl Sai, living on a dilapidated estate in sight of the Himalayas with her gruff grandfather and falling in love with her Nepali tutor, Gyan, a budding political insurgent. There is the story of her grandfather, a judge educated at Cambridge and all but estranged from his family and neighbors because of the only ideals he brought back with him from England: ambition and snobbery. And there is the story of Biju, who has left the village to pursue the American dream as an illegal immigrant in New York, finding work in the backroom underworld of downscale restaurants and bakeries.
Only Biju's father, who works as cook for the judge and often serves as comic foil to the pretensions and fantasies of those around him, understands that "money isn't everything. There was the simple happiness of looking after someone and having someone look after you." (Yet he, too, is believes that his son's future is in America.) The sisters Lola and Noni serve up comedy of a more scathing sort: two loony women lost in their BBC fixation and tea parties and faintly liberal pretensions ("they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful"). These supporting cast members belie the overall grimness of the novel with a humor that approaches farce; scenes of despair are adroitly balanced by numerous episodes of amusing, if stinging, mirth.
Every character in the novel--Sai, her grandfather, and her quirky neighbors; Biju and his father; Gyan and his fellow insurgents--are seeking something similar: a home, a heritage, an inheritance untainted by a loss of authenticity. For a curmudgeon like the judge and those of his generation, the pursuit of happiness remains forever out of reach, irreversibly polluted by his Anglophile conceits; he remains a character out of a Narayan novel, manhandled by postcolonial realities. For Sai, contentment surrounds her if she would only open her eyes to it. And for his part, Biju must be stripped--literally--of his hard-won Western trappings before he can fully understand what he left behind in India.
Exploring the deep, ostensibly irreparable chasms between India and the West, between rich and poor, Desai's novel conveys a cynicism that would seem to exclude the possibility of redemption or hope, and I'm not surprised so many readers have found it too depressing to endure. But, cynicism aside, the imagery and language used to conjure up her world are things of wonder in themselves. And it's hard to imagine the reader who won't be touched by the almost bittersweet passages of the closing chapter.
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3: Mortification of the mind
A Booker winner, set in India, by an author with an Indian background, living in the US, brought pleasant memories of Jhumpa Lahiri (OK, she won a Pulitzer, not a Booker, but work with me here...) to mind so I immediately snapped up The Inheritance of Loss. I was immediately greeted by a wickedly verbose literary acquaintance, Borges, in the form of an epigraph, but I thought it would be an outlier. Unfortunately, it was spot on.
Desai hooked me by painting a beautiful picture of Sai, sitting on a veranda of her grandfathers home, Cho Oyu, with an old National Geographic on her lap. The Himalayas stretched out before her, behind her, the unnamed cook rifled, gently, through a wood pile for fuel for his cooking fire, fearful of scorpions, surrounded by the remnants of a previous life. The beauty for me came mostly from my own memories of rural Nepal, but the book dragged me vicariously down a path of degradation, fear, humiliation and despair. From the mundane brutality of the grandfather when dealing with his wife, to the casual torture and maming of a drunken passerby, there is little beauty and much despair, and little story other than that of a group of neighbors forced to march into a future of loss and pain.
I paid $14 plus tax, wasted 5 hours I will never get back, and feel like I bathed in the pain of others to become a reluctant witness to this frustrating dirge.
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4: Great book
This book deserves a fresh endorsement, which I wholeheartedly give. The one disgruntled reader below ("Ashok") is symptomatic of newly-disgruntled Indian rightwingers--precisely the target of books like this one and Roy's "The God of Small Things." In fact, it's no coincidence that many wonderfully written novels from India are by women: They more acutely perceive, I think, the bullying that passes for patriotism behind so much of the vitriol spewing (perhaps understandably) from newly resurgent nations. Being Indian myself, but not partaking of any nationalist persuasion, I can say that those who react most strongly to these remarkable new novels expose their insecurities. (By comparison Western bullying is by now too obvious to need much of a gloss. I'm simply focusing on Indian writing here.)
Desai's novel deftly balances the worlds that variously inhabit what we call India--the colonial-educated scion of a fractured family, the son wandering off to New York in search of fortune, the indigenous northeastern peoples who yearn for independence, and, most of all, the young woman at the novel's center who tries to make sense of all this.
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5: Yuk
Like "reading" a slow train wreck - achingly dull and painful at the same time. There is no effort to make the reader care about any of the characters - do you really want to feel only alternating disdain and pity all the way through any book? Surely that could not have been the writer's intention?
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