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A review by marigold_bookshelf
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
2.0
I’ve recently re-read Kira Desai’s 2006 Booker winning novel The Inheritance of Loss, for a Spanish literary chat, and I was left searching for an answer when asked whether I actually liked the novel. It is, without doubt, a fine literary achievement, a complex novel that escapes categorisation, set in the remote Himalayan region of Kalimpong, and which deals with important aspects of post-colonial Indian life and displacement. But it is as desolate as it is evocative, often entirely lacking in hope.
Sai, a young orphaned woman, moves into the home of her maternal grandfather, the retired judge Jemubahai who is an embittered and generally nasty old man, having never recovered from his experience as a student of law in England. He is too Indian to be British, too proudly English to be at home in his native India. He lives with his English bred dog Mutt, and his impoverished cook whose son, Biju, is struggling to scrape a living together as an illegal immigrant in the United States. The novel constantly switches attention from Sai in Kalimpong to Biju in New York.
Sai falls in love for the first time, with her Nepalese tutor Gyan, whose affection seems to be reciprocated until he joins the Nepalese insurgency movement, after which he betrays her by leading his fellow militants to attack and loot the Judge’s house. The insurgents cause further disruption to their sadly comical middle-class neighbours, sisters Noni and Lola whose nostalgia for colonial life is caricaturised by their love of English jam and Marks and Spencer´s underwear, and the inebriated Uncle Potty who appears to be in a gay relationship with the Swiss priest and cheesemaker Father Booty.
Kiran Desai narrates the story with a brutal lack of sentimentality, leaving bare the harshness of the landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. It is not a book I managed to love, but fully deserves to be read and re-read – if that makes sense!
Sai, a young orphaned woman, moves into the home of her maternal grandfather, the retired judge Jemubahai who is an embittered and generally nasty old man, having never recovered from his experience as a student of law in England. He is too Indian to be British, too proudly English to be at home in his native India. He lives with his English bred dog Mutt, and his impoverished cook whose son, Biju, is struggling to scrape a living together as an illegal immigrant in the United States. The novel constantly switches attention from Sai in Kalimpong to Biju in New York.
Sai falls in love for the first time, with her Nepalese tutor Gyan, whose affection seems to be reciprocated until he joins the Nepalese insurgency movement, after which he betrays her by leading his fellow militants to attack and loot the Judge’s house. The insurgents cause further disruption to their sadly comical middle-class neighbours, sisters Noni and Lola whose nostalgia for colonial life is caricaturised by their love of English jam and Marks and Spencer´s underwear, and the inebriated Uncle Potty who appears to be in a gay relationship with the Swiss priest and cheesemaker Father Booty.
Kiran Desai narrates the story with a brutal lack of sentimentality, leaving bare the harshness of the landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. It is not a book I managed to love, but fully deserves to be read and re-read – if that makes sense!