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

by Kiran Desai (Author) "All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows..." (more)
Key Phrases: deaf tailors, thun thun, chun chun, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Cho Oyu (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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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From The New Yorker
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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (November 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871139294
• ISBN-13: 978-0871139290
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (166 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #294,112 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

184 of 203 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Caught up in the mythic battles of past and present, justice and injustice.", February 10, 2006

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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

41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Moments of brilliance, going nowhere, March 11, 2007

By	Cheryl Carruth (Boise, ID USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Inheritance of Loss (Paperback)

There are moments I love in this book... poignant observations that made me smile and think how brilliantly she'd nailed some unshakeable truth in life. There were details I enjoyed, such as on insects: "entire nations appeared boldly overnight." I loved the gentleness and clever vagueness with which she writes of Uncle Potty and Father Booty's relationship. She captures rage very well, showing how it's usually founded on something terrible from within, rather than on the acts of the target.

But as I read on, I became increasingly frustrated with the one-sided view of a country I've come to know and love. Yes, India has what she portrays, but it has so much more. There is kindness and tenderness amidst the poverty and rage. There are people with next to nothing who will give what they have to help a stranger - gave what they had to help me. Generosity and kindness exist alongside the indignities she portrays. Why not show that balance? I felt at times she was trying so hard, wanting so badly to shock the reader with her tales of vermin and vomit. Yes, that's there too. But it is not at the heart of the matter, and I think Ms Desai has missed that point.

Finally, Ms Desai should fire her editor for the many anachronisms in the book. The 1985-6 was not the time of the Macarena, baggy pants on teenage boys, or the negative use of the term "PC" (politically correct), to name a few. All that came later. Add to that, it appears that no one proofread the last third of the book. This carelessness coincided with how the prose itself progressed. It started wonderfully, and slid like a Himalayan landslide into negativity and caracature. The ending was utterly pointless, and I was left with moments of brilliance that ultimately went nowhere.

105 of 123 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Treat yourself to this inheritance.., January 9, 2006

By	Prashant Rao "prashy69" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.