Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3174 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
In the foothills of the Himalayas sits a once grand, now crumbling house - home to three people and a dog. There is the retired judge dreaming of colonial yesterdays; his orphaned granddaughter Sai who has fallen for her clever maths tutor; the cook, whose son Biju writes untruthful letters home from New York City; and Mutt, the judge's beloved dog. Around the house swirls mountain mist - but also the forces of revolution and change. For a new world is clashing with the old, and the future offers both hope and betrayal ...

Customer Reviews

A Reverse Passage to India Filled with Wit
If you like humorous books about how people live self-sabotaging lives to preserve their illusions of superiority, The Inheritance of Loss will delight you. If you prefer a novel that carries a strong plot line and significant developments you cannot predict, you'll wonder why anyone would read this book.

As I read the book, I was reminded of P.G. Wodehouse's writing. Mr. Wodehouse's novels were all rather similar, silly, and filled with predictable situations. But on each page there was a sentence that was so novel, fresh, and intriguing that it would stop your eyes while you thought about what you had just read.

Ms. Desai demonstrates a similar ability to create startling writing, but in her case the writing brings out loud laughter . . . at least it does for me. My wife said she hadn't heard me laugh so much while reading a book in years.

Here's an example. A group of young men is demonstrating in favor of independence. One talks about a better world he wants to create: "We will provide jobs for our sons. We will give dignity to our daughters carrying heavy loads, breaking stone on the road." That vision of male liberation has to make you laugh.

The other genius of the book is demonstrated by the ironies that Ms. Desai shares with us to suggest that our dreams are pretty dangerous. Why are they so dangerous? Dreams assume we control what happens to use. Ms. Desai is describing a world where someone with a sense of humor is running the show. For example, her father strives hard to become an astronaut . . . but loses his life in a mundane accident in a country he would never have visited if he hadn't had such a dream.

You could draw the conclusion from that example that Ms. Desai is a cynic. Actually, she loves people and finds them comically naive when it comes to pursuing their dreams. Her prescription would be to get some good information and then choose a direction that is practical for accomplishing something you want. Too many of the dreams she portrays are about class, status, and envy. Those dreams should always be suspect. Her vision is of a world where those perceptions should be no longer relevant, as A Passage to India taught.

I liked the way that she combined the ideas of people traveling to other countries and to other parts of Asia in search of something that they thought they couldn't find at home. That's why I called the book a reverse Passage to India. The most developed characters in this book are Indians who left India for at least a time in search of their dreams.

Be prepared for much fun. The book's main drawback from my perspective is that the humorous sentences thinned out considerably in the final third of the book, giving the ending a tone that didn't match the earlier fun. The marvelous ironies continue but they aren't so much fun.

Universal themes made personal
I have to disagree with many reviews of this book: I found it compelling, entertaining, beautifully written and thought-provoking. Anyone who has spent any period of their life living away from home for whatever reason will identify with the distracted difficulty of living "in a single existence at one time" that this book evokes.

I concede that it is a little flawed in structure and style, however I found the writing to be astonishingly lucid, humorous and insightful. The novel is built from a series of vignettes, some of which read almost as discrete short stories, some of which are as short as a couple of sentences. This approach is effective in portraying impactful images of setting and experience, and in supporting the theme of historical incoherence, where events develop almost of their own accord, nudged along by the naive and ignorant actions of people.

Elsewhere the themes of displacement, the complexity of distance, nostalgia, alienation from self and others, inauthenticity, foreign-ness, self-consciousness and human weakness across the generations are all played out under the shadow of Kanchenjunga mountain, the ultimate representation of truth and authenticity.

Desai throws us into the alienation experience of her characters by peppering her prose with unfamiliar Indian words. With the exception of Sai, Gyan and Biju, she identifies key characters either by their occupation or their nickname, in order to emphasise the mask of persona and lack of authentic will in each. Much more is made of the judge's affection for his pet dog Mutt than of the story of young love between Sai and Gyan, though in the end, youthful truth, love, wisdom and honesty provide precarious glimmers of hope and redemption.

The political buzzwords that appear on the dust jacket of this book don't really do it justice at all. This is a powerful and lyrically presented account of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the personal and the universal, and how one is so frequently and tragically ignorant of the other.

Surprise Booker Prize winner
I am sure I'm not the only one who was filled with expectation for this novel and was then a little disappointed with the outcome. I found the interjection of Indian words very frustrating at times, as one can usually work out what these mean by the context of the sentence, however there were often times that I felt a glossary of terms might have been useful. I also found myself not really empathising with many of the central characters, especially Biju and Gyan.

On the positive side, Desai's writing style made picturing the scenery surrounding the Himalayas quite easy and also the way the story alternated between characters was interesting. There were often times that a question arose from what I had just read, to be met with the answer a few paragraphs later, which satified my curiosity well.

The conclusion of the book seemed a little rushed for my liking and, although this is often the case and can't be helped, the story did not develop and evolve as I would have expected, which then left me with a sense of unfinished business.

I think I would have preferred it if I had just picked this book up of my own volition and not had such high hopes. The story may then have been appreciated for what it is and not what the hype had suggested.