The Inheritance of Loss | Kiran Desai

The Inheritance of Loss | Kiran Desai | It truly pains me not to give this 4 stars

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The Inheritance of...

	The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai Grove Press, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 157 reviews view larger image
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No romance

The book is largely about food. We watch the nearly nameless cook at his hard job with the miserable judge and poor forelorn Sai, and we watch his son Biju (bijoux?), the illegal immigrant in New York, chasing jobs in restaurants and other food related outfits. (Lots of rodents.)
It is also about relations between misfits. The book is mean and has many mean characters. KD's stile is often mean, her voice is sarcastic. It is totally appropriate for its subject: colonialism, its aftermath, then globalisation. She is not the one to write another epos about it, we had some of those, maybe enough for now. Maybe that warm feeling of identification with a positive hero is what some readers have missed who claimed the book is boring and mean.
Her story of the young couple who struggle over identity doubts is very well observed and described, though not romantic. The story of the judge and his wife is the least romantic one can imagine. It is as if the couple of Chesil Beach had been forced to stay together despite the bad start. And it never gets better.
(Part of the aftermath of colonialism is the amazing fertility of the global subculture of Indians writing in English. Just think of Naipaul, Rushdie, Mistry, Seth, Lahiri, Roy, the women of the Desai family, others that don't jump to mind right away... Amazing.)
I don't think we need simple judgements about world history. It is a fact that staying away from meanness when you are not involved in pulp is awfully hard. And actually it is no fun either.
Maybe the story could have been 'rounded' out better. It ends sort of in a rush and with an abundance of special effects. A slower finale might have suited the subject better. But is it worth deducting a star? Not really.
Another amazing fact of the book is how it attracts the most balanced diversity in feedback: all five stars in the grading scale here at Amazon are nearly equally selected. And the total number of feedbacks is quite high. In other words, high attention level, and high disagreement level.
Good for KD, it means she has something to say, and to sell.

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It truly pains me not to give this 4 stars

How utterly weird is it that the Amazon.com reviewers are many and so diverse in opinion. I read some reviews while in the middle of "Inheritance of Loss" and was mighty confused about all the 5's, all the great press and yet the 1-2 reviewers also spoke to me. I put aside this website and read the last half of the book.

I will brag, always a disaster, that I keep my own counsel about reading. Moreover, I know what I love and why I love it, and vice versa.

Now, finished, I am really caught between those who loved and those who did not love it. I believe, on a hunch, that Ms.Desai, who is incredibly talented--no doubt there--didn't edit this book to the best effect.

But I will say that the characters, far too many, each had poignant moments but that this work would have been far more effective as a series of interlinking short or long stories. What we have here is a situation that is described with a poetic and jugular voice, but with little in the way of real or gripping continuity. Nor is it real and gripping and discontinuous.

I am rarely affected by what others say but I think so many not liking this book did alter my perceptions. For even at the half-way mark, I was having trouble reading for fun with this novel. The negativity I came to feel was discussed here: You are waiting for the thing to take off, and ... it doesn't.

I think 7-8 years are too long to write an unweildy book that then has to be chopped, edited and made short, as Ms.Desai herself has implied. It was: Too choppy. Had: Too many characters. And: Too little follow through with most.

However, like those of you who loved this book and there are many critics who apparently agreed, I did see the author's amazing way with language and if any character was complete it was the mountain in India most of all, and the dog, MUTT more than any humans. Also well done: the whole scene of violence tearing into everyone. But my current take is that this book is mostly about describing a place.

I hope that in the future, and you know (Booker Prize et al) that she has one, Ms. Desai doesn't take such a vast canvas that then has to be slit open and/or pared down. I hope she uses her real gift for language by following a much smaller cast of characters who are far more easily or if not easily then eventually pared open for us readers. For this book is really not character driven nor character-fulfilled. It's too much and too little.

The author is clearly going someplace and I hope that the next place is far more accessible without losing her poetic and easy-going if dense: language skills.

All that said, I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone I love to read it, but I feel touched by her voice, one that is unique or surely original, a writer who has has huge possibilies. I actually hope that the author, Hi Kiram!, reads all these diverse posts we have created. Sure must be confusing to her as well as to us. Best, reader from Hawaii, lately of New York.

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A Meanspirited story

I love novels set in the Himalayas so when I read about Kiran Desai's novel I was keen to read it. I will grant that she is the master of detail, and her characters are solid, but her narrative perspective is not as the jacket read "lit by moral intelligence." In fact, I found this novel to be the contrary. Ms. Desai's stuck in one gear: bitterness. There are no redeeming or even likable characters in this novel. Everyone is petty and shallow, and the narrator seems to sit over everyone with a condescending bitterness that I found hard to swallow. I put it down several times and only finished it because I kept hoping it would get better. I talked to anyone I know who read this book and they all felt the same way. She needs to get off her moral high horse and really see people for the complex beings they are. I was so dissapointed. I give it a 3 rather than a 2 only because I do think her technical craft is good.

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