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The Inheritance of Loss

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Publisher
Atlantic Monthly
Date
Award Winners
Fiction
Historical
Literary
Winner of the Man Booker Prize

Kiran Desai illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters: an embittered old judge; Sai, his sixteen-year-old orphaned grand­daughter; a chatty cook; and the cook’s son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS.

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What The Reviewers Say
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The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence … Though relieved by much humor, The Inheritance of Loss may strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view. But then, as Orhan Pamuk wrote soon after 9/11, people in the West are ‘scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population,’ which ‘neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom.’ This is the invisible emotional reality Desai uncovers as she describes the lives of people fated to experience modern life as a continuous affront to their notions of order, dignity and justice. We do not need to agree with this vision in order to marvel at Desai's artistic power in expressing it.
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Positive
The New York Review of Books
Fate would seem to have been very good to the retired judge, Jemubhai Patel, who slipped into the Indian Civil Service after abysmally low exam results, thanks to the prop of Indianization … It is to Desai’s credit that, despite his unremitting cruelties, the judge does not seem monstrous, only weak and pathetic. She achieves this not through empathy, or even sympathy—the man remains reprehensible throughout—but by animating politics and making it the villain … This is a catalog of defeats, and Desai is unwilling to let anyone off the hook, especially the reader, who is denied that other refuge of moral laziness: the possibility of sudden, enlightened character transformation … It is a rare novel that succeeds when every supposedly good idea in it fails, but Desai is a gorgeous writer, capable of pulling us along on a raft of sensuous images that are often beautiful, not because what they describe are inherently so, but because she has shown their naked truth.
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Positive
The Los Angeles Tmes
The Inheritance of Loss takes place in Kalimpong, an Indian village in the eastern Himalayas on the border with Nepal. In the shadow of these great mountains and their ‘wizard phosphorescence,’ a handful of characters must find their own ways in a society alternately romancing its colonial past and trying to keep pace with a modernized future … If Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard established Desai as an expert storyteller, The Inheritance of Loss distinguishes her as a writer of note. The small canvas of Himalayan life, evocatively as it is wrought, is merely a jumping-off point. The picture Desai paints here is much broader, a deft and often witty commentary on cultural issues that are all too familiar in an interconnected world where immigration – and the accompanying blight of bigotry – have become an international norm.
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