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Jul
28
Book Review: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
2008 at 7pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Set in 1986 in India at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, where the Indian border meets those of Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan, and where people of many classes and cultures collide in their shared struggle to survive, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss presents the story of one family as a symbol of the global issues related to colonialism and the search for identity.
First we meet the retired judge, Jemubhai Patel, whose isolated house near the foot of the mountain is home also to his beloved dog Mutt and his cook, whose name we do not know until the second-to-last page of the book. The judge and the cook have lived together in apparent symbiosis for many years when the judge’s orphaned granddaughter, Sai, comes to live with them. Her arrival marks the beginning of the conflicts that define the novel. Also central to the story are Gyan, Sai’s Nepali tutor, and Biju, the cook’s son, who has traveled to America in hopes of escaping poverty and making enough money to eventually rescue his father from servitude.
The central conflict of the novel revolves around the Nepalis’ fight to gain education, health care, and other basic rights in India. Early in the story, a group of young insurgents storm the judge’s house and steal his rifles, literally robbing him of the signs of his Western education and professional occupation. When the tutor, Gyan, with whom Sai has begun a romantic relationship, joins the insurgency, Sai finds herself caught in the middle of a war of class and caste and discovers that she also has become a symbol of wealth that Gyan despises. The development of their relationship is gentle and beautifully written, and the passages about its destruction are harsh and difficult to read. Their conflicts in some ways reflect the judge’s conflicts with his wife, which we learn about through a series of flashbacks and memories that serve to flesh out the judge’s personality and help us understand where he is coming from.
While Gyan and the insurgents are fighting a battle for rights and freedom in India, Biju, the cook’s son, is fighting for his own survival and struggling to maintain his identity as he adapts to life in the U.S. As he hops from one menial job to the next, Biju discovers that America’s opportunities are not as plentiful as he expected, and he has given up a servant’s life in one country just to find the same life in a new country, where he faces constant poverty and exploitation. He even notes that, though poverty in America is substantially less severe than poverty in India, it is more difficult to live with because it is so obvious and noticeable, something the members of the middle class actively work to separate themselves from. Biju’s experiences illustrate many of the problems with colonialism and globalization, and when he decides to return to India, the message becomes even stronger when an American friend tells him:
You know…America is in the process of buying up the world. Go back, you’ll find they own the businesses. One day, you’ll be working for an American company there or her. Think of your children. If you stay here, your son will earn a hundred thousand dollars for the same company he could be working for in India but making one thousand dollars…You are making a big mistake. Still a world, my friend, where one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king.
I really, really wanted to love this book. It won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize (2006), and I had high hopes. Perhaps that was part of the problem. Desai’s story makes an important point, and it is certainly one that merits discussion and examination, but I felt that she was a bit heavy-handed with the agenda at times. In the beginning of the book, the writing was beautiful and made me want to slow down and linger in the world she was creating, but the feeling gradually dissipated as I got deeper into the story. The middle of a story is very important, and I had a hard time getting through this one. I found myself reading one or two chapters then turning on the TV, or going to see what my husband was doing, or taking a quick walk through the yard before I was able to come back to it.
Desai presents the similarities between the judge, Gyan, and Biju–as they fight to find their identities and reconcile themselves with their histories–very well, but she does not develop Sai’s character (or really, any of the other characters) as fully as I wanted her to. Biju was really the only character I cared for and found sympathetic, and I enjoyed the chapters that focused on him and the cook the most. This was a good book, but it was not a book that I loved or will be recommending to friends. Jhumpa Lahiri’s treatment of similar themes and issues is much more subtle and intriguing, so if you’re interested in the ideas and conflicts mentioned in The Inheritance of Loss, I’d suggest you pick up The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth instead.
Far from being impossible to put down, this was a good book, but not a great one. 3.5 out of 5.
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I found that *The Inheritance of Loss* weighed me down and left me with a feeling of hopelessness for the characters and their situations. Effective, but not one I would recommend. Like you, I expected to enjoy it, and wanted to enjoy it, but just felt exhausted after reading it!
Loved *The Namesake* and Thrity Umrigar’s *The Space Between Us*. I haven’t yet read Lahiri’s short fiction collection.
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