The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel (Man Booker Prize) - Hardcover

Reviews

Maybe it’s in her genes: the daughter of Indian novelist Anita Desai, Kiran Desai skips past the sophomore doldrums with this assured second novel. The same characteristics that made her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, notable are here in spades: an "utterly fresh" (Boston Globe) narrative voice, jaw-dropping descriptive passages, and a mélange of vibrant, sympathetic characters. But critics praise her graduation to a wider field of inquiry. She’s forgiven the occasional lapse into didactics, especially concerning the Nepalese revolt. Reviewers concur with the Los Angeles Times that The Inheritance of Loss "amplifies a developing and formidable voice."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Kiran Desai's second novel tackles the lingering effects of colonialism on two kinds of South Asian people: those who attempt to leave India and those who remain. Set in 1986 in Kalimpong -- a Himalayan town in India's northeastern corner -- as well as in New York, the book details the beginning stages of a love affair. Here and there it unleashes some moments of bleak comedy, but the sweet-natured playfulness that cartwheeled through Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), is conspicuously absent. Instead, the prevailing mood is implacable bitterness and despair.

Among those who find themselves immobilized in an ever-expanding web of debilitating Western influences are Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated retired judge whose unrequited Anglophilia has condemned him to a lifetime of loneliness and self-hatred; his convent-educated 17-year-old granddaughter, Sai, whose parents were killed in the Soviet Union, where her father was training to be an astronaut, and who now lives with the judge in his grand, crumbling mountain home; Gyan, a young accountant who abandons his budding romance with Sai when he joins a group of insurgents agitating for an independent Nepali state; and Biju, the only son of the judge's ill-treated cook, who roams silently through a series of menial New York restaurant jobs.

"Perfectly first-world on top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps below": This is Desai's succinct description of Biju's working environment, where his position in Manhattan's rat-infested basement kitchens is firmly fixed. It's a position in which the rest of her characters are metaphorically pinned as well. All of them are exiles whether at home or abroad, and all of them struggle -- and fail -- to maintain a foothold and a shred of dignity in the encroaching morass of Westernization.

What unfolds in the novel is not so much a plot as a sequence of illustrations of Desai's worldview. There are shifts backward in time to the judge's Cambridge days, when "he worked at being English with the passion of hatred." There are descriptions of the slowly mounting insurgency in Kalimpong, where angry young men demanding a homeland shout and march "as if they were being featured in a documentary of war . . . these unleashed Bruce Lee fans in their American T-shirts made-in-China-coming-in-via-Kathmandu." The narrative swerves restlessly, as if the book itself were motoring up Kalimpong's dizzying mountain roads. It veers from Sai's fledgling romance with Gyan during the monsoon season to the judge's long-ago failed marriage, from the tragicomic anxiety of the judge's elderly neighbors during the insurgency to Biju's humiliations as a bewildered illegal alien, forever at the mercy of soulless embassy bureaucrats and heartless restaurant bosses.

Desai's grim imaginings are plainly designed to disturb and challenge complacent readers and to instill a sense of dislocation similar to that of her protagonists. But the force of her enterprise is diluted when her restlessness as a storyteller spills into impatience. Just as the reader begins to engage with a character, the narrative jumps to another time and place, another set of dire circumstances, making it difficult to develop any sort of uninterrupted sympathy.

The author's impatience reveals itself also through the constant introduction of minor characters, most of whom appear all too briefly, like Biju's friend Saeed Saeed, a Zanzibar native whose unflagging determination to succeed in America is one of the book's only flashes of optimism. Interspersed throughout the book, these smaller portraits are illuminating, but too distractingly sketchy to offer the reader an emotional connection.

With The Inheritance of Loss, Desai makes clear her intention to expand her reach from the narrow boundaries of her first novel to the global arena where big-name novelists like Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith already confidently perform. In many ways, she has succeeded. The writing has a melancholy beauty here, especially in its sensuous evocations of the natural world: "white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick"; "mountains where monasteries limpet to the sides of rock." Her keen appreciation of contradiction enriches the book, and, if the integrity of her narrative is less than perfect, the integrity of her ideological convictions is absolute.

Yet what's most surprising about Desai's career thus far is that her first book was, in one important way, a more sophisticated effort than its successor. A small, brilliant fable, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard showed off its young author's profound comprehension that every novel, large or small, is at its heart an intimate thing. Its success depends on its author's unwavering attention to a group of characters who are the reader's emotional conduit to the book's wider drama. Some of that comprehension seems to have been left behind in Desai's leap to her second, more ambitious production.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp 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. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty.
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*Starred Review* Desai's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) introduced an astute observer of human nature and a delectably sensuous satirist. In her second novel, Desai is even more perceptive and bewitching. Set in India in a small Himalayan community along the border with Nepal, its center is the once grand, now decaying home of a melancholy retired judge, his valiant cook, and beloved dog. Sai, the judge's teenage granddaughter, has just moved in, and she finds herself enmeshed in a shadowy fairy tale-like life in a majestic landscape where nature is so rambunctious it threatens to overwhelm every human quest for order. Add violent political unrest fomented by poor young men enraged by the persistence of colonial-rooted prejudice, and this is a paradise under siege. Just as things grow desperate, the cook's son, who has been suffering the cruelties accorded illegal aliens in the States, returns home. Desai is superbly insightful in her rendering of compelling characters and in her wisdom regarding the perverse dynamics of society. Like Salman Rushdie in Shalimar the Clown (2005), Desai imaginatively dramatizes the wonders and tragedies of Himalayan life and, by extension, the fragility of peace and elusiveness of justice, albeit with her own powerful blend of tenderness and wit. Donna Seaman
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