The Inheritance of Loss

By Kiran Desai

★★★★★

Five Things I Liked About The Inheritance of Loss:

1. Sai and Gyan’s romance

2. Mutt the dog

3. Noni and Lola’s anglophilia and sisterly banter

4. Fluid backwards and forwards chronology

5. Vividness of setting (India!)

I read The Inheritance of Loss for my English class, but it’s the kind of book I might have picked up of my own accord anyway (one of the many things I love about college reading lists). Inheritance is another Booker Prize winner, but I found it far more enjoyable than the last one I read. Also, I’m a sucker for a pretty cover, and this one’s as pretty as they come! I will be proud to display this spine on my bookshelf, for more reasons than one.

The Inheritance of Loss takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas in a small Indian town called Kalimpong, and sets the personal lives of a small but diverse cast of characters against the backdrop of an Indian-Nepali insurgency led by the Gorkha National Liberation Front*. The arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, causes the hardened shell of a solitary judge to begin to crack, letting memories of the past seep into his consciousness and disturb his carefully cultivated stoicism. Meanwhile, the judge’s cook, who steps in as a makeshift father figure for Sai, lives off the hope he harbors for his son Biju, who is making his way in the New York underworld of immigrants and restaurant workers, hoping to earn a green card and enough money to return home to his father. Back in India, the Gorkha insurgency brings to the surface undercurrents of tension in the Kalimpong community between the Westernized elite and the indigenous poor, illustrated poignantly by the romance that blooms between Sai and her Nepali tutor, Gyan. At stake is not only the judge’s peace of mind, Biju’s success in America, or the future of Sai and Gyan’s fledgling romance, but the very culture of a nation, a hierarchical and historied way of life chafing against the past, present, and future all at once.

The Inheritance of Loss is divided into chapters, which are then divided into smaller sections by scene, sometimes a couple pages long, and sometimes only a few lines. The chapters alternate between Sai, the judge, and the cook in India and Biju in America, as well as between the judge’s past and the novel’s present. Desai’s writing is rich in imagery – color, sight, sound, and smell - bringing to life the lush exoticism of the Indian countryside (spiders, snakes, and scorpions made multiple appearances as merely a matter of course, *shiver*), the distinct and shifting voices, desires and fears, and convictions of the ensemble cast, and the nuances of a highly stratified country navigating a new layer of social complexity.

For some reason, The Inheritance of Loss seemed reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer’s work to me. Maybe it’s their shared ability to characterize large-scale social upheaval by focusing on the personalized conflicts of a handful of individuals, or their occasional playfulness with traditional style, or the high-resolution snapshot they give you of another culture’s daily circumstances, a sharply focused foreground of mundanity against the blurred background of the remarkable.

I’d recommend The Inheritance of Loss to anyone, but perhaps particularly to those who’ve enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, Everything is Illuminated, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

*If you don’t know what the GNLF is, don’t fret – I didn’t either. Basically, the GNLF campaigned to break off the Nepali-speaking areas of northern India into an independent state. Tensions arose, ensued, and were largely not overcome. The movement continues today.

Books Read This Year:

Top 100 Progress: 42/100

Possession (Top 100 #39)

By A.S. Byatt

★★★☆☆

When my roommate first noticed this book sitting on my desk, waiting to be read, she laughed and thought it to be some kind of mass-market paperback caliber romance novel. With a title like Possession, I don’t blame her! But in fact, Possession resides in a completely different realm of literature. It won Byatt the Booker Prize – England’s highest literary honor – in 1990 and is included in the BBC Top 100 list I’m slowly but surely working my way through*.

I think the fact that the title is so misleading is largely due to the connotations of the word ‘possession,’ which first conjures up notions of obsessive romance. While romance is an integral aspect of Possession, the novel does not limit itself to it but spans the word’s multifaceted connotations.

Possession, n. The act or state of being possessed**; the physical control or occupancy of land, property, etc, whether or not accompanied by ownership; domination, actuation, or obsession by a feeling, idea, etc.

Contemporary scholars of the Victorian poets Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey are united by academic intrigue when Roland discovers a letter hinting at a hitherto unknown connection between the two poets. The academic investigation that ensues not only overhauls Roland and Maud’s understandings of the poets they’ve devoted their lives to, but overhauls the lives of the academics themselves as the unveiling of the connection between the presumed devoted husband and lifelong spinster becomes increasingly high stakes and personal. As far as that pesky word ‘possession’ and it’s multifaceted connotations, Possession explores the obvious possession rendered by love, as well as the possession of historical documents and artifacts, and even the possession of historical figures by the people who study them – and vice versa.

Depending how you look at it, Possession is either the most theatrical novel about academia you’ve ever read, or the dullest and densest mystery novel you’ve ever read. 

My problem with this book is that Byatt interrupts the narrative to insert excerpts from the poets’ epic poems, drafts of their personal letters, and even blurbs from biographies and analytical essays that often went on a bit too long and were – let’s face it –just plain dry. I get why she did this, I really do. She wanted the reader to feel they were immersed in the investigation too; she wanted us to feel as though we knew the poets as intimately as Roland and Maud. But the end result was disruptive and would disengage me every time I really started to be drawn in to the story – and it was a compelling story. I just thought it went on a bit too long.

Now, metaphors and themes and foreshadowing aside, the point of writing a novel – any novel, chick lit, classic, or otherwise – is to tell a story, is it not? And thus it follows that a successful novel is one whose story draws the reader in, whereas an unsuccessful novel fails to do so, resulting in a novel which is an effort of diligence and toil to read. The question, then, becomes: Is a novel successful if it is literarily admirable without being engaging? Conversely, is it successful if it’s engaging without being particularly literarily admirable? I’ll leave you to ponder. If you come up with anything decisive, let me know.

* There's also a movie based on it, but I watched the trailer and I don't think I'll bother watching it. Partly because Aaron Eckhart bothers me, and partly because it just doesn't look good.
** Illuminating, no? I hate definitions that use a different conjugation of the word to explain the meaning of the form in question.

Books Read This Year: 10

Top 100 Progress: 39/100