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The Inheritance of Loss | 
 enlarge | Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  148 reviews
Sales Rank: 7682
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0802142818
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780802142818
ASIN: 0802142818
Publication Date: August 29, 2006
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Product Description
Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She 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. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her handsome tutor, their lives descend into chaos. The cook witnesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. A story of depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, The Inheritance of Loss tells a story of love, family, and loss.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 143 more reviews...
 A perfectly written blend of fact and fiction August 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Reading Man Booker Prize winning books is a bit hit and miss. They are all incredibly well written novels, but those that tend toward the poetically written tend to be weak on story. Not this one. While giving the back story on Sai, the Judge, the cook, Biju and all of the other colourful characters either in New York or in the Himalayas, the main story just keeps pulling you along.
The seemingly peaceful lives of the people gradual gets thrown into chaos in perfect timing with the leadup to the violent demonstration in 1986 toward a separate state in Darjeeling for the Gorkhas. The blend of fiction with historical events gives the book incredible dramatic power. And Kiran Desai's prose is beautiful. You find yourself rereading entire passages just to hear the sound of her words again. I would highly recommend this book.
 Disappointing... August 2, 2008
I love books - love to read - and am very seldom disappointed. The painfully bleak setting and equally grim characters made this book drag on and on, page after page. Have to say, I was glad to be done with it - but would have been happier had I never cracked the cover!
Ultimately disappointing July 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai is a magnificent, impressive novel that ultimately is disappointing. As a process, the book is almost stunningly good. As a product, it falls short.
The book's language, scenarios and juxtapositions are funny, threatening, vivid and tender all at the same time. The comic element, always riven through with irony, is most often to the fore, as characters grapple with a world much bigger than themselves, a world that only ever seems to admit them partially, and rarely on their own terms. The one criticism I have of the style is Kiran Desai's propensity to offer up lists as comic devices, a technique that works a couple of times, but later has the reader scanning forward to the next substance.
An aged judge lives in the highlands of north India. As political and ethnic tensions stretch through the mountain air, he reconsiders his origins, his education, his career, his opportunities, both taken and missed. He has a granddaughter, orphaned in most unlikely circumstances, as her parents trained for a Russian space programme. But what circumstances that create orphans are ever likely? She is growing up, accompanied by most of what that entails.
The cook in the rickety mansion is the person that really runs the household, his rule-of-thumb methods predating the appliances he has to use and the services he has to provide. He manages, imaginatively. He has a son, Biju, who eventually forms the centrepiece of the book's complex, somewhat rambling story. Biju has emigrated to New York, where he has made it big, at least as far as the folks back home think. On site, he slaves away in the dungeon kitchens of fast food outlets, restaurants, both up and downmarket, and a few plain eateries. Kiran Desai provides the reader with a superb image of globalisation when she describes the customer-receiving areas of an upmarket restaurant flying an advertised, authentic French flag, while in the kitchen the flags are Indian, Honduran, anything but French. Now there is true authenticity for you, offered up in its manufactured, globalised form.
Biju, of course, dreams of home, but the comparatively large number of US dollars he earns - at least as far as the folks back home see it - barely covers essentials in someone else's reality.
The narrative of The Inheritance Of Loss flits between New York, northern India and elsewhere, and also between the here and now, yesteryear and the judge's childhood. And perhaps it flits too much, because the scenes are often cut short before the reader feels they have made a point.
And ultimately this reader found that the book lacked focus. While the process was enjoyable, the product was not worth the journey. The Inheritance Of Loss seemed to promise to take us somewhere in this globalised confusion of identity, motive, routine, unrealised dreams and intangible desires, but eventually it seemed to have nothing to add to a sense of "well that's how it is", which is precisely where we started. There was an opportunity for more, but it was ducked.
The book was thus a thoroughly enjoyable read that threatened to achieve greatness through statement, but unfortunately missed the mark, and by a long way.
If you buy and read this, it's your "inheritance of loss" ! July 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Unable to believe this won a Booker prize! What's with the committee? What kind of a message is it driving to readers by endorsing such a pathetic book by endowing it a prestigious award? By the time you finish you will be/have:
(1) "Drained and depressed", by the grim and dismal world created by Desai
(2) "Confused and irritated", with the heavy linguistic pretense
(3) "Mentally flagellated", by the unbearable constant negativity of the characters
(4) Lost either your "money" or "time" or both.
(5) Regretting your "inheritance of loss"!
What more can I say, the title says it all and justifies it all.
Fiction in serious need of an editor July 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Inheritance of Loss was one of our book club selections, and unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the meeting where it was discussed. No matter. I didn't finish the book because it was simply too frustrating and painful to continue reading. The structure -- short, choppy sections on each page -- was to me like watching a dance video that never stops long enough on the dancers to appreciate what they're doing. What's worse, nothing happened that made me want to continue to the next sections and it was a downer the entire time I was reading it. I see from other reviews that some felt the downer mood continues right to the end. I read a lot and am willing to stick with a book if it doesn't grab my attention right from the start, but I'm afraid this one didn't have any redeeming qualities for me. Time is too precious to waste on books that I don't enjoy.
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