Aug 4, 2008 Posted by Nancy Williams on Aug 4, 2008 in Booker Challenge, India | 0 comments

The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai

I am not sure what it is about books chosen for the Man Booker Prize. Yes, they can be beautifully written. Yes, they can conjure up powerful imagery. But sometimes they get so bogged down in their own ‘literary-ness’ that they forget to simply tell a good story. The Inheritance of Loss suffered from this Booker Prize affliction just like so many of the others do. That is not to say it wasn’t a good book, but with a little less emphasis on being literary and a little more emphasis on the story, it could have shifted from being good to being great.

The book follows the life journeys of a cantankerous, intensely dislikeable judge, his cook – a simple somewhat pathetic figure – and his unwanted granddaughter, Sai who comes to live with him when her parents die. Set in Kalimpong, India – a province which is very close to Nepal – the tale jumps from time to time, location to location as the life that all of the characters knew in the villages is swept away by a violent Nepalese uprising. In the meantime, the cook’s son, Biju, is struggling to survive as an illegal immigrant in America. Whilst his father and the other villages maintain ignorantly to one another that America is the land of plenty and Biju is clearly living like a king, the lad scrapes a living working in kitchens and sleeping on a filthy mattress in an overcrowded squat.

This is a story of change. It places the minutiae of every day life in contrast to the massive changes occurring in both India and America. Sai’s love affair with her tutor, Gyan is destroyed by his peer influenced need to join the uprising. Biju’s Hindu sensibilities against eating steak are set against the hardships, discrimination and lack of rights he receives in his new home. The judge’s loss of his dog is comically yet tragically contrasted to the massacre which occurred during the uprising which irrevocably changed the life of anyone within the vicinity.

The characters were all colourful and many incited different kinds of emotion. The judge’s malicious, murderous and totally unjustified treatment of his wife was probably the most powerful. It demonstrated that irrespective of background or birth, there was always someone to look down upon or treat badly. The other incredibly powerful theme was the racism throughout the novel – whether it was the Indian racism towards the Nepalese, the racism the judge received in England, or the class discrimination which existed in the village itself, if this book has one overarching message it seems that there is always someone to fight, someone to blame and something to lose.

The story lacked some coherence and there were ends which were left open in a way which I found very unsatisfying. This is certainly not an uplifting story. I finished it feeling saddened and angry. Perhaps that makes for a prize winning novel, but for me it made for a quick beeline to the nearest book of humour I could lay my hands on.

Rating: 7/10
ISBN: 0-241-14348-9
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2006
Date Finished: 18 July 2008
Pages: 324
Challenges: Booker Challenge