Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS” by Kiran Desai
(first published 2006)
I usually write
these “Something Olds” by going to the extensive notes I’ve taken in my reading
diaries over the last twenty-or-so years, and then writing them up in readable
form, sometimes doing a little extra research as I do so. In the case of Kiran
Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,
however, I am not going to do this. The
Inheritance of Loss is one of the best Booker winners of the last decade,
and I recommended it emphatically when I reviewed it for the New Zealand Listener in the year it
appeared. So I am simply going to serve you the review I then wrote.
Before I do so,
however, a few of my usual words on the author. As many people noted when she
won the Booker, Kiran Desai (born 1971) is the daughter of another
distinguished novelist, Anita Desai, who has been three times
Booker-shortlisted but who, unlike her daughter, has never won it. The Desais (mere et fille) are of Bengali and German
ancestry, so the themes of racial and cultural identity, especially as they
relate to India, and of the impact of different cultures upon one another, are
natural themes for both of them. Anita Desai now teaches literature at an
American university. Kiran Desai moved from India as a teenager (aged 15) and has
also largely been resident in America ever since. Apparently Kiran Desai is a
meticulous and slow writer. The
Inheritance of Loss took her seven years to write and was only her second
novel. She is the youngest woman to have won the Booker.
And what follows
is simply, and unaltered, the review I wrote for the Listener (18 November 2006):
*
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * * *
* * *
* * *
* * * *
About two-thirds
of the way through The Inheritance of
Loss, there’s an ironic and sad scene where upper-class Indians are buying
in essential supplies, so that they can barricade themselves in their homes to
ride out a period of civil strife.
Essential
supplies include reading matter from the local club library. One Anglophile
woman states her preference for the novels of Anthony Trollope “Old fashioned books is what I like,” she
says. “Not the new kind of thing, no
beginning, no middle, no end, just a thread of… free-floating plasma.”
As drawn by
Kiran Desai, the speaker is a shallow fool. But I’m sure that Desai approves at
least in part of her sentiment. The
Inheritance of Loss is modern in the sense of having a lively apprehension
of different cultures and their relativity, a sharp ironical eye and multiple
narrative points of view. But it also has a clear beginning, middle and end –
the sort of firm structure that is absolutely essential for real impact in literature.
In Kalimpong in
Darjeeling, bang up against India’s border with Nepal, retired judge Jemubhai
Popatlat Patel thinks nostalgically of his days in the (British) Indian Civil
Service and pretends to be a cultured Englishman. But in his dreams he relives
racial humiliation in England and knows how much his Englishness has been
compromised.
Meanwhile down
in the servant quarters, the cook imagines his son Biju is making a great
success of himself in the new global power, the United States. But we know better.
Biju lives a precarious existence in New York without a Green Card, toiling for
exploitation wages in fast-food joints and restaurants that are, says Desai, “perfectly first-world on top, perfectly
third-world twenty-two steps below.”
Between the judge
and the cook is the judge’s orphaned teenage granddaughter Sai Mistry, old
enough to be falling in love, and beginning to get sentimental over her Maths
tutor Gyan. But Gyan, frustrated and poor, is drawn to be part of a local
nationalist insurgency.
The novel is set
in the mid-1980s, when Indian-Nepalese are about to demand separate statehood
in a violent way. It moves between the consciousness of Judge Patel, Sai, the
cook, Biju and Gyan. From the opening page we know bad things are going to
happen to its wealthier characters when young men break into the judge’s house
and steal firearms in the name of an independent Gokhaland. The novel observes
closely, but ploughs a clear narrative path.
Kiran Desai
(Indian-born, American-resident) satirises the unreal memories that expats
often have of their homeland and the unreal images that the colonised often
have of their overlords. Western tourist views of India get a pasting, but
Desai is equally merciless about the religious snobberies, class distinctions and
ethnic barriers among Indians. She loves India, but observes its pimples
without postcolonial whining.
If cultural and
political matters are part of a novel, there’s a temptation to reduce it to a
list of Important Themes. I admit to peeking at Pankaj Mishra’s review of this
novel in the New York Times, and I
discover that it is apparently about Globalisation, Multicuturalism, Economic
Inequality, Fundamentalism and Terrorist Violence.
Indeed it is
about all of these things. In part. But if they were the whole of The Inheritance of Loss, it would be
more tract than novel. The inheritance of
Loss is as much about Desai’s excellent style, ability to sum up character
in a phrase and eye for a telling image. Phrase for phrase, it is a rich work.
Like all literary
prizes, the Booker has an uneven track record. It’s sometimes gone to brilliant
works (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children, Nadine Gordimer’s The
Conservationist), sometimes to duds (James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late) and sometimes to what seem consolation
prizes for writers whose better work had missed out (Ian McEwan’s trite Amsterdam). Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss was this
year’s [2006’s] Booker winner. In this case, the judges got it dead right.
No comments:
Post a Comment