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| The Inheritance of Loss | 
 enlarge | Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  148 reviews
Sales Rank: 507724
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B0018SYY0U
Publication Date: August 29, 2006
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 143 more reviews...
 "Caught up in the mythic battles of past and present, justice and injustice." February 11, 2006
191 out of 211 found this review helpful
Writing with wit and perception, Kiran Desai creates an elegant and thoughtful study of families, the losses each member must confront alone, and the lies each tells to make memories of the past more palatable. Sai Mistry is a young girl whose education at an Indian convent school comes to an end in the mid-1980s, when she is orphaned and sent to live with her grandfather, a judge who does not want her and who offers no solace. Living in a large, decaying house, her grandfather considers himself more British than Indian, far superior to hard-working but poverty-stricken people like his cook, Nandu, whose hopes for a better life for his son are the driving force in his life.
The story of Sai, living in Kalimpong, near India's northeast border with Nepal, alternates with that of Biju, Nandu's son, an illegal immigrant trying to find work and a better life in New York. Biju, working in a series of deadend jobs, epitomizes the plight of the illegal immigrant who has no future in his own country and who endures deplorable conditions and semi-servitude working illegally in the US. As Desai explores the aspirations of Sai and Biju, the hopes and expectations of their families, and their disconnections with their roots, she also creates vivid pictures of the friends and relatives who surround them, evoking vibrant images of a broad cross-section of society and revealing the social and political history of India.
Though Sai's romance, at sixteen, with Gyan, her tutor, provides her with an emotional escape from Kalimpong, it soon becomes complicated by Gyan's involvement with the Gorkha National Liberation Federation, a Nepalese independence movement which quickly becomes violent. Gyan's commitment to the insurgency offers an ironic contrast with the commitment of his family to the colonial British army in earlier times, just as the judge's hatreds, learned in England, are ironically contrasted with his British affectations in later life.
A careful observer of behavior, with a fine eye for revealing details, Desai brings her narrative and characters to life, illustrating her themes without making moral judgments about her characters--creating neither saints nor villains, just ordinary people leading the best lives they can, using whatever resources are available. Her characters, like people from all cultures, make sacrifices for their children, behave cruelly toward people they love, reject traditional ways of life and old values, rediscover what is important to them, suffer at the hands of faceless government officials, and learn, and grow, and make decisions, sometimes ill-considered, about their lives. Dealing with all levels of society and many different cultures, Desai shows life's humor and brutality, its whimsy and harshness, and its delicate emotions and passionate commitments in a novel that is both beautiful and wise. n Mary Whipple
Treat yourself to this inheritance.. January 10, 2006
101 out of 118 found this review helpful
It is very rarely that one comes across a book which touches upon big issues, in such a richly felt, detailed yet economic manner.
"The Inheritance of Loss",i am sure would be Kiran Desai's breakthrough novel. Set in Kalimpong (that beautiful town in the North East of India)in the mid 80's, this novel follows the journeys(and exiles) of its principal characters.
The retired grumpy judge, Jemubhai Patel, studied in a Victorian England, groomed by the Raj,all of which made him rise above his humble roots, to be a revered, fearsome(and very confused) judge...Sai, his orphaned grand daughter, exiled from the convent to be home schooled (by those delightful Bengali sisters Noni and her sister Lola) discovering the first flush of youth, the first pangs of love, with her Nepalese tutor Gyan...or Biju, the judge's cook's son who is moving from one restaurant job to another, as an illegal immigrant in New York.
All the characters are sharply etched, clearly defined and follow an often unpredictable trajectory of departures and homecomings.
Kiran Desai, has an eye for detail, as is amply evidenced from her settings, from Kalimpong to New York, from Victorian England to Rural Gujarat, from the description of the Marks and Spencer's underwear (note never "lingerie"), to the tense and characteristic atmosphere in the American Embassy at New Delhi, to the impeccable description of "desi" girls in US of A... this book comes alive in these settings.. and the delights of reading, is in discovering one such fully realized situations after another...
For the grand scope and long journeys of the plot, this book is compact and economical, while being infinitely wise. The resolutions of some the characters are sad, (whoever told us that life is fair!)..but the writer allows us to experience the small joys of her characters lives, those moments in which they are truly themselves, berating the virtues of the US over England, living in their "grand civilizations" of "music, alcohol and friendship"
Little wonder then that Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for this book, making her the youngest women in the history of the prize.
 Awfully bad November 29, 2006
100 out of 167 found this review helpful
What a miserable book this is. I bought it after it won the booker and was particularly interested because the setting was India. It became obvious after the first 50 pages or so that this was going to be a terrible read and I put it aside for a while. The only reason I finished it was that I had nothing else with me on a recent flight. In retrospect, even that was not a good enough reason to finish it. Staring into empty space would have been more rewarding.
That this is a worthless piece of fiction is easy to conclude -- the characters are all hollow, one dimensional and uninteresting; the two parallel narratives do not get anywhere and do not combine in any interesting way; at no point is there any kind of dramatic tension; and the writing style is pretentious.
What is more bothersome is the enormous negativity in the book. Not a single character has a single, unadulterated positive thought in the entire book. The judge hates everything, the cook longs for his son, the son is struggling all the time, the judge's grand daughter is lonely/vague and her love affair is pathetic. Not to mention the assorted issues that everyone else is dealing with. Whats more, things only get worse for all of them as the book proceeds.
Kiran Desai completely misses the importance of the family in India's social structure, in terms its contribution to happiness despite economic and other challenges. A setting where every character is missing at least a parent/spouse/child seems unrealistic and makes it all the more negative. Throughout the book, she gives a distinct impression of not knowing what she is writng about. The poor light in which Indians are depicted is truly reprehensible. The only character who makes any kind of upward progress through the book (Saeed) is a non-Indian. All the Indians are hypocrtical, unsuccessful, frustrated and devoid of personal hygiene.
It takes a really perverse mind to come up with such a petty, humorless book and it takes an equally perverse set of reviewers to give it a booker prize. Just shows that the prize must be driven by factors other than literary merit.
No RK Narayan October 24, 2006
30 out of 39 found this review helpful
Desai's attempt shows promise, but there is a very big problem. The depicticions of Gyan and his friends as well as of the Cook and Biju's world just does not ring true. as a middle-class Indian whose parents battled poverty and who grew up in the 80s- the real sense of turmoil and anticipation we felt does not come through. I remember a singular lack of hostility to the rich, but tremendous anxiety about the future as well as about the law and order. We- my friends and I- also felt tremendous hope that things were getting better economically- our main pre-occupation.
Desai belongs to the rarified world of upper crust Hindu elite who think and dream in English and look down on the religion and culture of the local people(i.e their own)- they find them slavish and superstitious. While she depicts this very well in the shape of the Judge JemuBhai, at other levels, it is clear that she does not connect with ordinary Hindus or their worlds very well. Very few Indian writers writig in Engllish escape this problem- Only RK Narayan, Sashi Deshpande and Raja Rao seem to have a genuine sympathy and fellow-feeling for their subjects. Arundhati Roy has oodles of talent so is able to hide this well, but Desai's prose is not that good. While Desai avoids obvous pitfalls of talking down about the Indians-Nepalese, and this is a better book than Hullabalooo, it still is not really very insightful about India.
Choppy and overrated June 7, 2006
29 out of 54 found this review helpful
I was dissapointed by all of the hype and rave reviews this book was given. The author has good subject matter but has chosen a most difficult and almost incoherent writing style in which to convey her thoughts. The novel jumps from place to place faster than rabbit being chased by a fox. Chapters consist of bits of images pasted together like a collage rather than in a coherent, logical order. The novel reads like a MTV rap video. Perhaps some consider this innovation. I consider it bad prose.
The prose is choppy, awkward and at times obscured by so much symbolism as to be obscure and unintelligable. Many sentences fail to follow logically what was written previously. CHapters are broken down into one or two sentence subchapters that seem loose and unconnected.
All this makes for painful reading that in the end seems not worth the effort. The reviewers seem to be attracted to the unique style, glitz that may impress some but ultimately loses its shine.
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