The Inheritance of Loss Paperback – August 29, 2006

One of the most beautifully authentic books I've ever read, Desai's THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS is also one of the grimmest. It reminds me very much of a luscious nightmare, one which you awake from remembering not stories or events, but a strange, unshakable tone or hue. You couldn't say, upon waking, what has you so disturbed, but you can say that it is heartbreaking -- even distressing -- in the way of all truly gorgeous things.Desai has not written a story here. Not at all. Instead, she has shaped and colored four perfect lights. One light shines on Jemubhai Patel, a retired Indian judge steeped in a borrowed British heritage, his closest friend a dog named Mutt. Another light illuminates Sai, Patel's granddaughter, an orphaned transplant from the muddy half-world that exists at the borders between culture and indoctrination. The final two lights spread the hem of their glow around the judge's twitchy, superstitious cook, and Biju, the cook's son, now scrabbling through the grimy microcosm that (just barely) houses America's lowest working class.These lights have fuzzy edges, and where they overlap, the colors are almost indescribable. The connections between these four people aren't quite so remarkable as the way they are described. The novel's larger themes -- colonialism, cultural disaffection, the clockwork precision of tyranny, unrest, and rebellion -- are treated with a plain-faced simplicity, Desai's real talents aimed more at the individuals who must learn how to deal with the sometimes invisible ripples of politics and passion.Chapter Twenty-Eight begins, "The judge was thinking of his hate." For many, this will be a novel of hate, a book of tiresome gloom, and I won't say that's not true on more than one level. Life (and literature even more so) is about, if anything, conflict and entropy. The second law of thermodynamics just as easily applies to hearts and souls as it does to kinetic energy, and Desai's book deals with all of those things with a prose that is both dark and crystalline.Because Desai is more concerned with a tableau than with a plot, because her lights illuminate a stage and not a story, many might find the book to be a gorgeous but meandering mess. And with "stories" of this type, it's difficult to find an ending that is anything but abortive. It took Desai seven years to write this novel, and that's just as evident in her fluid narrative technique as it is in her denoument. Like a child releasing a helium-filled balloon, this novel doesn't so much end as just drift away. A fittingly torturous finale to a book of so much hubris and humanity, it may not be as satisfying as the rest of the book, but it is at least as touching, and certainly as brilliant.

Although not an easy, breezy read The Inheritance of Loss is worth your time. It is difficult for a number of reasons: the poverty, the politics of colonialism and it's long-term effects, the caste system, the violence. But the characters come alive and the book has history, humor, a bit of love and love spurned and it really makes you think. It makes you think hard about the politics of poverty, about travel to poor countries, about immigration issues and about how we have a long way to go to bring about equity and compassion to these difficult political issues. The title of the book says it all - for some people it is difficult to escape their inheritance - whether that is an inheritance of privilege or of loss.

Mirage Book Club reviewsThe Inheritance of Loss by Kiran DesaiThe 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, MDMember, The Authors Guild