The Inheritance of Loss

Product Information

Natasha Walter found it a "grim" novel, highlighting "how individuals are always failing to communicate". [5] The Observer found some excellent comic set-pieces amid the grimness. [6] The New York Times claimed Desai "manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence." [7] the author is obviously an intelligent writer, and she has a real mastery of language. much of the writing is somberly poetic. but perhaps she pays too much attention to detail..... the story is slow..... The story is set in the 1980s in Kalimpong, located in the northern part of India near Darjeeling. The main characters are Sai, a seventeen-year-old girl living with her grandfather, who is a judge. The judge is an educated man who attended Cambridge University but has fallen in social position due to the country's political unrest. He carries the weight of having abandoned his wife, so he feels he is paying off his guilt by allowing his granddaughter, Sai, to live with him after her parents die. Gyan is Sai's tutor and boyfriend. Other principle characters are the judge's cook and the cook's his son, Biju. Biju went to America and works illegally in kitchens in New York City. Throughout the novel, there are two story strands—one following the lives of the people in Kalimpong, and one following the life of Biju.

Before long, he finds himself yearning for India. But it may not be an India he remembers. In the region where his father is also an underpaid, unrespected, food worker, there is a growing insurgency gathering arms. India’s Prime Minister was assassinated the year before and there is a feeling the country is being torn apart. The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007, [1] and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award.This is one of my favorite novels written about Indian immigrants in the USA. I generally consider myself a fast reader. But I took one whole month to finish this book. There were too many ideas that made me close this book and contemplate it for a long time. Desai says that her novel “tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant” and goes on to say that it also explores at a deeper level, “what happens when a Western element is introduced into a country that is not of the West”. Desai also asks “What happens when you take people from a poor country and place them in a wealthy one. How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time?”

I say generally because occasionally Desai steps over the boundary between enjoyably rich and horribly cloying. Take the following, for instance: "a simple blind sea creature, but refusing to be refused … odd: insistent, but cowardly; pleading but pompous." That is how Desai renders a male "organ". There's also a whiff of sixth-form straining for profundity. A man who is blinded disappears "entirely inside the alcohol that has always given him solace". And when a light blows it diminishes "to a filament, tender as Edison's first miracle held between delicate pincers of wire in the glass globe of the bulb". High in the Himalayas sits a dilapidated mansion, home to three people, each dreaming of another time. In this quotation, Noni, Sai's tutor, expresses that her life is wasted and stagnant. Mistakenly believing that an appearance of respectability was the key to happiness, Noni abandoned her dream of being an archaeologist and never found love. On their remote estate, Noni and Lola idealize contentment and seek to recreate an imagined colonial past. In this quotation, Noni advises Sai to reject romantic views of isolation and pursue a life that excites her.

Sign in

Biju thinks about and misses his father daily; much of his emotional energy is spent trying to figure out ways to ease the cook's worries. However, when Biju calls his father for the first time in three years, he realizes that their relationship has been damaged by their time apart, their separate experiences changing them. In this quotation, Biju expresses his intense fear that, through their time apart, his father will realize his affection for Biju was simply a matter of habit and obligation. But here there were Indians eating beef. Indian bankers. Chomp chomp. He fixed them with a concentrated look of meaning as he cleared the plates. They saw it. They knew. He knew. They knew he knew. They pretended they didn’t know he knew. They looked away. He took on a sneering look. But they could afford not to notice. […]

Chapter 3 focuses on Biju, the cook's son who lives in New York City. He works selling hot dogs for Gray's Papaya. Biju constantly compares himself to the overly confident workers he is surrounded by. They are crude and take him to a prostitute, insisting that he participate, suggesting that he is not a man unless he has sex. Biju feels humiliated and does not feel himself to be a man. Sai has been living in the house for nine years and it has probably become the only home she has known. Her father, a pilot, was recruited from the Indian Air Force for the Intercosmos Program during the period of friendship between the Indian and Soviet governments. Sai’s parents put her in a convent, aged six, when they moved to Russia where they died two years later in an accident, leaving Sai an orphan. On her parent’s death, the convent sent Sai to live with her grandfather, the Judge. Now seventeen-years old, Sai is slowly falling in love with her tutor, Gyan, an ethnic Nepali. You had to live according to something. You had to find your dignity. The meat charred on the grill, the blood beaded on the surface, and then the blood also began to bubble and boil. It almost feels like Desai is trying to convey a message to the reader about the importance of things in life which perhaps she sees are often overlooked.

There's perhaps a small grain of truth to these claims. Desai certainly doesn't glorify Kalimpong's non-Indian majority. But the irony is that they get off lightly compared to everyone else. As she teases out her multiple narrative we meet over-privileged Indians who put on absurd English airs; racist, ignorant and distinctly under-intelligent English people; Indians in America who use Gandhi's image to make money while exploiting other Indians; and Indians in America who allow themselves to be exploited. Also, there are the Americans themselves, whose capitalist empire is perhaps the cruellest thing in the book. Nearly every character she focuses on is at some stage degraded and humiliated. Nearly every character also degrades and humiliates others. The "loss" of the title is physical, spiritual, and inescapable. With a cantankerous old judge, his loyal cook and his estranged granddaughter, hardly speaking to each other, their pasts unknown to the reader; living in a dilapidated mansion in the Himalayan foothills of Northern India, as the main setting; The Inheritance of Loss opens with the haunting feel of an Indian Wuthering Heights. The style of the writing in The Inheritance of Loss is difficult to describe and a little enigmatic. The writing is teeming with tiny details, observations and anecdotes that conjure an intimate knowledge and give it the ring of truth. Though it contains moments of humour, its best moments are the sad ones that readers, especially those who have their own experiences of its themes, will empathise with. And, though its themes are complex, without easy solution for those who appreciate them, Desai engages with them in short segments within short chapters that make for an easy-to-read book containing burdensome ideas. As soon as Gyan joins the GNLF protest, his frustration and anger are immediately redirected toward non-Nepalis and other beneficiaries of colonialism. Though Gyan navigated various social spaces and fell in love with Sai, he revives the inherited prejudices he once criticized. Rather than recognizing the complex root causes of his oppression, Gyan takes out his anger on Sai because humiliating and betraying her is immediately gratifying. Kiran Desai (born 3 September 1971) is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize [1] and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. [2] In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women. [3] Early and personal life [ edit ]