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

Kiran Desai (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2005 | Series: Man Booker Prize

Kiran Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS, forced to consider his country's place in the world. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai's new-sprung romance with her handsome Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they, too, are forced to confront their colliding interests. The nation fights itself. The cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge must revisit his past, his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires-every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal. A novel of depth and emotion, Desai's second, long-awaited novel fulfills the grand promise established by her first.

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; First Edition edition (November 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780871139290
• ISBN-13: 978-0871139290
• ASIN: 0871139294
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (208 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #819,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

251 of 274 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 HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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

134 of 145 people found the following review helpful

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

By Cheryl Carruth

Format: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.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Making more with less September 8, 2007

By Larry Dilg VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Reading The Inheritance of Loss made me uncomfortable. On several occasions I drifted off, thinking about the implications of unfettered immigration both on the quality of life for the immigrants and for people in host countries. The sheer size of India's population is staggering, and its rate of growth can only spill into other countries. From the perspective of Kiran Desai's New York immigrants, Saeed and Biju, the entire world is full of Indians struggling to survive, competing with each other and anyone else for the few available resources. One readily sympathizes with the struggles of Indians both abroad and at home, but just when liberal salve seems about to soothe the reader into thoughts of the romantic poor, we see the rich get disinherited by liberation soldiers, homeless people on the edge of starvation, and the lower class desperate for a step up. Desai's rich characters are never so sympathetic that we make the mistake of thinking they deserve their comfort and wealth, even if they haven't earned the suffering that becomes their lot. More than once I found myself making an inventory of those possessions I could lose without bitterness or decline in the quality of life. It's one thing to acknowledge your good fortune and quite another to part with it in the name of equality. We all inherit loss, however, and the pace of change in Desai's India seems a harbinger of the changes we'll feel in the US.

Luckily, the story isn't all grim. The author's eye for detail is extraordinary: small miracles appear on each page. The field of her prose is so studded with gems that one reads quite slowly. My feelings didn't flow too freely - even though I was fascinated by her close attention to the world, her satirical descriptions of character, the play of ideas, and the relevance of many of the issues - I seldom cared deeply about the fate of the people in the novel. Impending doom made me wary, callous behavior made me judgmental, and the writer's eye was on details both smaller and larger than the emotional life of one or two people. I loved Sai, the young girl at the heart of the story, who seemed to be an innocent version of Ms. Desai. The most emotionally wrenching aspect of the story concerned the judge and his pampered dog, Mutt. Even as I condemned him for abuse toward people, I recognized the pathos in his love for his pet. Those characters who sneer at him for loving an animal more than people may have a righteous point, but his dilemma comes too close to home for readers like me. We're glad just to see that his love has some outlet, which makes the plot all that much harder to bear.

The more I've thought about it, the more I enjoyed this novel. While I was reading I wished for something funnier, lusher, or more romantic, but in the end I was challenged, enlightened, and heartened by the novel. I'm glad to be living in a time when I can depend on Kiran Desai to reveal the world to me.