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: "How could Indians travel in the world and live in the world the same way Westerners did?"
Summary: 5 Stars
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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