The Inheritance of Loss | Kiran Desai

The Inheritance of Loss | Kiran Desai | Ultimately disappointing

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The Inheritance of...

	The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai Grove Press, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 146 reviews view larger image
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Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters: an embittered old judge; Sai, his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter; a chatty cook; and the cook?s son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai?s new-sprung romance with her handsome tutor, their lives descend into chaos. The cook witnesses India?s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju?s intertwining lives. A story of depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, The Inheritance of Loss tells a story of love, family, and loss.

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Powerful, realistic

A powerful novel, which kept me up reading every night. At once so many dimensions-a political novel, tackling issues of class, prejudice and race; one of the few works portraying the realities of the illegal immigrant underclass in America-and the hopes and dreams that started it all; the self sabotage that destroys families.
We read all the time about the success stories of immigrants to the US, but most people are unaware of the immigrants who are hopelessly trapped in poverty and who are worse off than where they left. The portrayal of the visa issue system is stunningly accurate, having observed this first hand for myself, in several countries. Not for those who view the world with rose tinted glasses, or don't want to accept the realities of the lives of many.

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Ultimately disappointing

The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai is a magnificent, impressive novel that ultimately is disappointing. As a process, the book is almost stunningly good. As a product, it falls short.

The book's language, scenarios and juxtapositions are funny, threatening, vivid and tender all at the same time. The comic element, always riven through with irony, is most often to the fore, as characters grapple with a world much bigger than themselves, a world that only ever seems to admit them partially, and rarely on their own terms. The one criticism I have of the style is Kiran Desai's propensity to offer up lists as comic devices, a technique that works a couple of times, but later has the reader scanning forward to the next substance.

An aged judge lives in the highlands of north India. As political and ethnic tensions stretch through the mountain air, he reconsiders his origins, his education, his career, his opportunities, both taken and missed. He has a granddaughter, orphaned in most unlikely circumstances, as her parents trained for a Russian space programme. But what circumstances that create orphans are ever likely? She is growing up, accompanied by most of what that entails.

The cook in the rickety mansion is the person that really runs the household, his rule-of-thumb methods predating the appliances he has to use and the services he has to provide. He manages, imaginatively. He has a son, Biju, who eventually forms the centrepiece of the book's complex, somewhat rambling story. Biju has emigrated to New York, where he has made it big, at least as far as the folks back home think. On site, he slaves away in the dungeon kitchens of fast food outlets, restaurants, both up and downmarket, and a few plain eateries. Kiran Desai provides the reader with a superb image of globalisation when she describes the customer-receiving areas of an upmarket restaurant flying an advertised, authentic French flag, while in the kitchen the flags are Indian, Honduran, anything but French. Now there is true authenticity for you, offered up in its manufactured, globalised form.

Biju, of course, dreams of home, but the comparatively large number of US dollars he earns - at least as far as the folks back home see it - barely covers essentials in someone else's reality.

The narrative of The Inheritance Of Loss flits between New York, northern India and elsewhere, and also between the here and now, yesteryear and the judge's childhood. And perhaps it flits too much, because the scenes are often cut short before the reader feels they have made a point.

And ultimately this reader found that the book lacked focus. While the process was enjoyable, the product was not worth the journey. The Inheritance Of Loss seemed to promise to take us somewhere in this globalised confusion of identity, motive, routine, unrealised dreams and intangible desires, but eventually it seemed to have nothing to add to a sense of "well that's how it is", which is precisely where we started. There was an opportunity for more, but it was ducked.

The book was thus a thoroughly enjoyable read that threatened to achieve greatness through statement, but unfortunately missed the mark, and by a long way.

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