Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Half a classic, 25 Sep 2006
It took a while, but I've finally finished The Inheritance of Loss. Overall, I really enjoyed it, although the first half was really hard work.
Kiran Desai starts out narrating a number of stories.
There is the life of Sai and her grandfather, the judge. Both are native Indians, living on the Nepali border, but have been of middle class stock. They have a fading grandeur: once they were influential but as chaos descends upon their part of India, they become increasingly irrelevant. Sai's maths tutor, and briefly a suitor, starts to become embarrassed by her as he becomes more involved in the Gorkha separatist movement.
There is an engaging story of Biju - the son of the judge's cook. Buji is an overstayer in the USA, working illegally in a succession of fleapit cafes along with workers from all over the world. His father, the cook, dreams that Biju is having a better life.
There are various back stories, including a Swiss cheesemaker, a pair of retired ladies of leisure, a dog and a little cat.
For the first half of the novel, it is not clear exactly what direction things are going in. I found the Biju story quite captivating, but found events in India rather disjointed and, actually, rather dull. The frequent use of Indian words, in italics bit without a great deal of context, started to become irritating and there was a sense of drift.
In the second half, though, Biju is left forgotten as events focus on the disintegration of Gorkhaland into anarchy. The westernized Indians found themselves threatened by the insurgents and unable to trust the loyalties of the police, neighbours and closest confidantes. This descent was really quite horrifying and balanced the personal detail with the general destruction to perfection. The pace picked up and plot, characterisation and detail all seemed to sharpen into focus. One was left wondering, though, why we had invested so much emotion in Biju.
The ending, when it came, was sudden and not quite satisfactory. Too many threads were left hanging and I never really understood the significance of the final events.
I thought this was a dense book - half of it brilliant - but that it fell just short of being a classic. It made an interesting contrast to Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, which also drew on Indian civil unrest; tension between western and eastern values; and the struggle of the personal values against the epic struggle of history. I think Rushdie hit the balance more successfully and reached a more satisfying conclusion. But this shouldn't detract from what Kiran Desai gets right in Inheritance. We should celebrate the half that is a classic rather than lament the half that is not.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Slow to the point of turgid, 27 Mar 2007
I was disappointed in this novel, which describes an isolated household living in the Himalayas, suffused with loneliness. Desai is better on landscape than character; she captures both the Himalayas and New York well. However, she does not manage to sketch the political landscape with the same lightness and surety of touch; the points Desai wants to make drive the story rather than letting the characters drive it for themselves.
That said, the sense of fear and oppression is caught reasonably well, although not a particularly enjoyable read. The New York section is by far the most successful part of the book.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
super prose, insightful reflections, but lacking in substantive plot, 20 Mar 2007
Reading the Inheritance of Loss i had an immediate feeling of deja vu - John Banville's 'the sea', seemed to deal with similar issues of loss, grief, unfulfilment, and fitting in with a strange culture. Both novels share a similar narrative voice, but overall the sea was more affecting.
Kiran Desai creates some beautiful sentences and insightful reflections, such that i found myself reading the same paragraph several times over as i basked in its glory. However, each time she creates an interesting scene, usually regarding Biju's difficulties surviving in America, she concludes the scene early before any really drama can occur. In fact the book is broken into zillions of mini-chapters which for me breaks up the unfolding drama, decreasing its overall effect.
Generally the plot is fairly non-existant. Readers of 'the Sea' or some of ian mcewans work will be familiar with this concept i.e. that the book is an exploration of pop psychology and philosophy and doesn't possess an adrenaline pumping storyline.
Overall i found it very enjoyable mainly because of the prose and its comparison of Hindi and Western culture, albeit superficially.
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