The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kiran DesaiEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-29
ISBN: 0802142818
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of The Inheritance of Loss
Book Review: MBC Reviews The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Summary: 3 Stars
Mirage Book Club reviews
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The author Kiran Desai, a 35-year-old Indian-English writer, was brought up in a literary environment: her mother, Anita, a three-times Booker nominee, was born in Delhi to a German mother and a Bengali father and grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city, but she writes only in English--Anita's first book, Cry, the Peacock was published in England in 1963, and her better known novels include In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). Anita left India to teach for years at Mount Holyoke and MIT and now spends most of the year outside of India. Indeed, the selection of The Inheritance of Loss as the winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006 didn't surprise the Anita, Kiran Desai's mother, but she was so anxious about the final prize announcements that she traveled to a small village in India where she heard of her daughter's ascend to the finalists and then winning the award.
Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi in 1971 and went to St. Joseph's Convent in Kalimpong, India till the age of 14 when her family moved to England and a year later to Massachusetts, where Kiran Desai completed her schooling. She studied at Bennington College, VT and Hollins University, VA and received her MFA from Columbia University, where she took two years off to write her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She is a citizen of India but lives permanently as a legal green card holder in the United States.
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai's second novel was published in 2006. It is set in mid-1980's India, at the time of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired, Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook, Pitaji whose name is only revealed on the penultimate page of the novel. The novel ends tragically when Biju, the cook's son, returns to the village bereft of pride and belongings after a pointless and painful attempt to establish a life in the U.S. The other characters in this novel fare no better; everybody loses: a heartbroken Sai loses Gyan, her math teacher and romantic interest, to the Nepalese independence movement; the isolated Judge loses his treasured guns; the cook loses any hopes of witnessing his son's success in America.
The author describes India's caste system, village life, the Nepalese border region and the political upheavals more vividly than any other Indian-English writer save Salman Rushdie. She demonstrates exceptional ability to handle the style of magical realism and develops a highly literate description. Sentence structure, vocabulary, and phraseology are lyrically and superbly crafted. Her mastery of these technical elements probably was good enough to convince critics and referees to award numerous accolades to the author.
Where Desai fails in this book is when she attempts to construct characters, especially when she describes illegal aliens in the United States. Desai's inability to create a realistic life for Biju in New York is both tragic and inexcusable. Living in America more than half her life should have enabled her to decipher the lives of people like Biju, many of whom rise from the basements, obtain legal status and acquire either decent education or a business. She should know it's illegal in the U.S. to ask for visa status in public schools!
Biju's story is improbable from the start when he obtains his initial visitor's visa so easily: "He dusted himself off, presenting himself with the exquisite manners of a cat. I'm civilized, sir, ready for the U.S." But when we visit him again in a basement in Harlem, he is a different character, passive and inept. "He had one bag with him and his mattress," and in the new place, "The rats of his earlier jobs had not forsaken [him] . . . one chewed [his] hair at night." Unlike many strong-minded, hardworking, adventurous legal or illegal immigrants who build a new life in the U.S., Biju makes no serious attempt to untangle the web of desolation surrounding him. His fate is astounding, considering that the number of Indians with small businesses exceeds that of any other minority in the U.S., e.g., the Patels own the largest chain of motels in the United States.
But Gyan who is Biju's second shadow in India and faces a different set of issues but fares no better.
The author suffers from post 9/11 syndrome; she is heavily influenced by the recent international trend to downgrade the Western or American life-style and its values. Desai's magic realism is a distorted personal imagination of Biju's life in America and later upon return to India. It is astonishing that a novel with such disappointing character development, defective storyline, and excessive rhetorical structures can win a prestigious award. It must be assumed that she won the Man Booker Prize because her superb writing style and beauty of sentences totally mask the novel's narrative flaws.
Mo H. Saidi, MD
Member, The Authors Guild
Summary of The Inheritance of Loss
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge?s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai?s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
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