a punch-in-the-gut illustration of class hierarchies in India and the United States

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	• The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai Grove Press, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 148 reviews view larger image
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A beautifully written novel.

This novel, "The Inheritance of Loss", is wonderfully written. Desai uses the text in this novel as one would use text in poetry. The histories and interactions of the characters are well executed and sometimes intensely dramatic. This novel depicts how those who are raised under a colonizing nation must either adapt to the post-colonial nation or remain isolated and unwanted.

A somewhat challenging read, but a beautifully written book.

Delightful

In a decrepit and lonely house somewhere in the Indo-Nepal region is a judge who simply wants to give-up on an outside world that has been mostly unjust. When his orphaned granddaughter- Sai, arrives into this little world of seclusion, everything changes dramatically. The descriptions and imagery in this book are incredibly beautiful. Set in the 1980's, it forcefully creates a situation where all the characters must reexamine their own lives in the context of the changed circumstances. A little slow, at first, but wonderful once you lose yourself in the beautiful mountains of Kalimpong.

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a punch-in-the-gut illustration of class hierarchies in India and the United States

The Inheritance of Loss is somewhat difficult to get into. None of the characters are drawn particularly sympathetically: They are interesting, but they don't engender caring about their fates. And the political setting is tough to grasp without any background. (Most of the book takes place in the 1980s in a town called Kalimpong, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, and the major political backdrop is an insurgency by ethnic Nepalis.) As a result, I was largely ambivalent for the first two-thirds of the book. Desai's prose is often beautiful, but that didn't feel like enough.

However, towards the end of the book, the class tensions rise, whether between the aristocratic, Anglophile judge in Kalimpong and the poor ethnic Nepalis in the same areas or between the judge's cook's son, who is an illegal immigrant in the USA, living in a rat-infested restaurant, and New York investors lunching at steak houses. The book does a better job than most of demonstrating the emotional toll that social inequalities take on people on the top as well as those on the bottom, as well as the natural bitterness that can ensue when fortunes change.

The book is a complete downer, but maybe this is a needed reality check. "As Orhan Pamuk [Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature] wrote..., people in the West are `scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population,' which `neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom'" [1].

An equally (or slightly even more) depressing novel also taking place in India and with a more engaging plot is Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. I highly recommend it; its focus is entirely on the plight of the poor, less on inter-class relations per se, but it is excellent.

Meera Simhan reads the audiobook (10 CDs) and does a fine but unexceptional job.

[1] Pankaj Mishra, "Wounded by the West," New York Times, February 12, 2006.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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