Unlikely Aristotle

Book of the Week: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai | April 3, 2010

It’s been an usually long amount of time since my last post, and if there was someone out there in the world waiting for my hater comments on Moby Dick or lovely woman of the subcontinent (I’m just jealous), then I am so sorry to have kept you waiting.

Speaking of lovely Indian women…*drumroll* Kiran Desai is stunning in more ways than one.

I completed her book about a week ago, and I could have reviewed the other book that I had read since then, but I wanted to make a point. The point that I wanted to make was that, I didn’t have to review it as soon as I put that book down. The characters and the imagery of the Nepalese region of India, where this story takes place, is still vivid in my mind.

The main story surrounds a handful of characters, but mainly the three living in Cho Oyu, a romantic, dilapidated mansion on top of a hill in the village of Kalimpong. The three are a reclusive former judge; his wanderlust-ful granddaughter Sai, and their poor cook.

When I realized that this book was going to take place in as picturesque and breathtaking an area as the Nepalese regions of India, I was weary at first, and then pleasantly surprised. Something I have grown tired of (in all honesty, and this is my own personal opinion, remember!) is authors who – naturally – write about their own nation, but describe it in such a decadent and dramatic way that I’m just like, Ok I get it, you love your freaking country, can we get to the story?

Again, you might disagree with me here, but I did get a hint of this with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children (although still a fantastic read) and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (totally excusable in her case, though, given her larger than life relationship with her country). Well, I guess this tends to be an issue when a central theme of the book is the relationship (or lack of one) between the characters and their nation. Indian novelists, I feel, have in time mastered the art of depicting this relationship, one of which have been exemplified in this great book.

The book goes back and forth, across different times, and different continents, following Sai’s journey from her boarding school to finally reconnecting with her grandfather, following the journey of the son of the poor cook, Biju, who travels to America illegally, and his story is the story of the millions of immigrants who have left their homes in search for a better life, and all the fascinating contradictions that entail. All these stories are set against the backdrop of a growing tension with the Gorkha people, the Nepalese in India who have long since felt they were treated as second-class citizens.

What I really love about this story is how each character’s personal stories are told so effectively. At times it seems like a miracle that Desai didn’t devote 300-odd pages to each character’s story, rather than to such a colorful cast. In addition to this, while each character’s tale remained deeply personal, after reflection, I could understand that each one was a sort of ambassador of their kind, representing a different class of disillusionment within India: one is the young Indian boy who is weaned on colonialist Britain, a product of a very confused time, trains himself perpetually to shed his Indian roots and become the ideal: as close to a civilized Englishman as he can be. He succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, overcoming religion, caste, language, everything in order to ‘raise himself up’ above the rest. His disillusionment with the colonial system and with the way his whole life has turned out appears to be the story of millions, just as much as Biju the immigrants’ story.

Despite all the depictions of the harsh realities of their lives, the story is consistently humorous, touching, sensitive, and very tasteful. I love most of all the fact that it had not implied that immigration to America or England as being the ultimate dream that anyone could possibly ask for. In fact, to me it seemed quite the opposite, that she was disillusioned with the way in which many people yearned for the West.

I give this book two thumbs up! It was an entertaining, educating, touching book that left me thinking, and gave me the mixture of hope, fear, anger, and joy that any masterful author is capable of doing.

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