The Inheritance of Loss [Paperback]

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 America. 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, creating a vibrant picture 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 bloody. 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. Mary Whipple

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.

From the first page the reader is struck by the extraordinary richness and brilliance of the author's imagery (though this is less consistent as the novel proceeds), and soon afterwards by the delineation the characters who are living in or near Kalimpong, under Kanchenjunga, the Himalayan peak on the border between India and Nepal. Living in an isolated house outside Kalimpong are Jemubhai Patel, a crusty, embittered and rage-filled retired judge who had withdrawn into this remote corner of India; his orphaned granddaughter Sai, for whom he needs has to provide a home and a tutor to teach her; and the judge's long-serving cook, who basks in the reflected glory of what the judge once was, and, above all, in the pride that he has a son, Biju, `working for the Americans', unaware of the menial jobs he is doing in New York as an illegal immigrant, along with the flotsam of other illegals from all over the Third World. With the exception of the cook, none of the book's main characters, especially the western-educated ones, really know where they belong when the clash of cultures becomes an issue.

For in that particular corner of India the Nepalese are the majority population, and the area is plagued by the rise and increasing activity of the Gorkha National Liberation Front with its demands for an independent Gorkhaland. Class is also an issue here. In the second half of the book, the activities of these people impinges on all the characters in the book: on the elderly middle-class and anglicised Indians in the area, but also on the unnamed poor caught between the violence of the rebels and the brutality of the police. The young are also affected: Gyan, Sai's tutor, is a poor but educated Nepali; and initially they are very much in love. One central part of the story is how Gyan becomes drawn into the liberation movement and what that does to the relationship between him and Sai.

All this could have made for a very strong story line; but around it are pages and pages which contribute nothing to the plot, but mainly paint people and places, mostly in India, but also in New York where the cook's son is working.

At the end, one strand of the story finds a moving resolution; but many other strands are left as loose ends: perhaps a symbol that for such conflicted lives as are pictured in these pages there is not likely to be a resolution.

Kiran Desai writes engagingly, and I did enjoy reading this book; but I found it rather self-indulgent, meandering, and too loosely constructed to be really satisfying. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, so the judges obviously did not feel the same.