Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10390 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802142818
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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

From The Washington Post
Kiran Desai's second novel tackles the lingering effects of colonialism on two kinds of South Asian people: those who attempt to leave India and those who remain. Set in 1986 in Kalimpong -- a Himalayan town in India's northeastern corner -- as well as in New York, the book details the beginning stages of a love affair. Here and there it unleashes some moments of bleak comedy, but the sweet-natured playfulness that cartwheeled through Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), is conspicuously absent. Instead, the prevailing mood is implacable bitterness and despair.

Among those who find themselves immobilized in an ever-expanding web of debilitating Western influences are Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated retired judge whose unrequited Anglophilia has condemned him to a lifetime of loneliness and self-hatred; his convent-educated 17-year-old granddaughter, Sai, whose parents were killed in the Soviet Union, where her father was training to be an astronaut, and who now lives with the judge in his grand, crumbling mountain home; Gyan, a young accountant who abandons his budding romance with Sai when he joins a group of insurgents agitating for an independent Nepali state; and Biju, the only son of the judge's ill-treated cook, who roams silently through a series of menial New York restaurant jobs.

"Perfectly first-world on top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps below": This is Desai's succinct description of Biju's working environment, where his position in Manhattan's rat-infested basement kitchens is firmly fixed. It's a position in which the rest of her characters are metaphorically pinned as well. All of them are exiles whether at home or abroad, and all of them struggle -- and fail -- to maintain a foothold and a shred of dignity in the encroaching morass of Westernization.

What unfolds in the novel is not so much a plot as a sequence of illustrations of Desai's worldview. There are shifts backward in time to the judge's Cambridge days, when "he worked at being English with the passion of hatred." There are descriptions of the slowly mounting insurgency in Kalimpong, where angry young men demanding a homeland shout and march "as if they were being featured in a documentary of war . . . these unleashed Bruce Lee fans in their American T-shirts made-in-China-coming-in-via-Kathmandu." The narrative swerves restlessly, as if the book itself were motoring up Kalimpong's dizzying mountain roads. It veers from Sai's fledgling romance with Gyan during the monsoon season to the judge's long-ago failed marriage, from the tragicomic anxiety of the judge's elderly neighbors during the insurgency to Biju's humiliations as a bewildered illegal alien, forever at the mercy of soulless embassy bureaucrats and heartless restaurant bosses.

Desai's grim imaginings are plainly designed to disturb and challenge complacent readers and to instill a sense of dislocation similar to that of her protagonists. But the force of her enterprise is diluted when her restlessness as a storyteller spills into impatience. Just as the reader begins to engage with a character, the narrative jumps to another time and place, another set of dire circumstances, making it difficult to develop any sort of uninterrupted sympathy.

The author's impatience reveals itself also through the constant introduction of minor characters, most of whom appear all too briefly, like Biju's friend Saeed Saeed, a Zanzibar native whose unflagging determination to succeed in America is one of the book's only flashes of optimism. Interspersed throughout the book, these smaller portraits are illuminating, but too distractingly sketchy to offer the reader an emotional connection.

With The Inheritance of Loss, Desai makes clear her intention to expand her reach from the narrow boundaries of her first novel to the global arena where big-name novelists like Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith already confidently perform. In many ways, she has succeeded. The writing has a melancholy beauty here, especially in its sensuous evocations of the natural world: "white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick"; "mountains where monasteries limpet to the sides of rock." Her keen appreciation of contradiction enriches the book, and, if the integrity of her narrative is less than perfect, the integrity of her ideological convictions is absolute.

Yet what's most surprising about Desai's career thus far is that her first book was, in one important way, a more sophisticated effort than its successor. A small, brilliant fable, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard showed off its young author's profound comprehension that every novel, large or small, is at its heart an intimate thing. Its success depends on its author's unwavering attention to a group of characters who are the reader's emotional conduit to the book's wider drama. Some of that comprehension seems to have been left behind in Desai's leap to her second, more ambitious production.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

"Caught up in the mythic battles of past and present, justice and injustice."
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

Moments of brilliance, going nowhere
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.

Treat yourself to this inheritance..
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.