The Inheritance of Loss.(Book review)

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

By Kiran Desai

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006

THE MAJESTIC HIMALAYAN PEAK called Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain, casts its shadow over most of the protagonists of Kiran Desai's new novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Other shadows, cast by sociopolitical forces near and far, abound as well, shaping the lives of even the most private of Desai's characters.

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As a work of literature, The Inheritance of Loss impresses with its sumptuous language, lush metaphors and inspired turns of phrase. Desai's writing is often bewitching, bringing to life in visceral detail the settings in which her characters struggle, endure and collide. ("And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing, chilly and solitary--not anything you could grasp.") But this is much more than finely wrought prose: Desai clearly has strong social and political convictions, and her novel works as a vehicle to help us reconsider our own.

Desai and her characters wrestle with a variety of social myths and realities. In a small town in northeastern India, where we find a retired judge, his cook and his orphaned granddaughter, issues of class often arise. The granddaughter, Sai, enjoys chatting up the cook while he works, but upon visiting the cook's hut out back, she is shocked and embarrassed by his poverty. Sai's closeness with the cook draws the disapprobation of Sai's tutor, an anglophilic spinster, who opines, "It was important to draw the lines properly between classes or it harmed everyone on both sides of the great divide." The retired judge is likewise prone to class-based judgments. When he, who was born into the peasant caste, first joined the civil service, "how he relished his power over the classes that had kept his family pinned under their heels for centuries."