Book review: The Inheritance of Loss

I am not much of a reader and can quite easily lose patience with books that are slow and uninteresting to me, which in itself explains why I have not done a single book review on this blog thus far. It’s pretty much an aberration of the genes, I believe because my parents and even grandparents are voracious readers and my mom and grandmom are known to have devoured books of varied genres: right from business magazines to reader’s digests to novels to religious texts to comics. Having said that, surprisingly, I have brought myself to read some of the most insipid pieces of fiction (Last Man Standing David Baldacci, Acceptable Risk Robin Cook) and my mom was amazed that I managed to reach the last pages of these books when she herself used them as a soporific for her afternoon siesta. But that is beside the point. I did manage a few good reads apart from the absolutely racy and fantastically unreal pieces of pulp fiction by the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Sidney Sheldon.

I had never read a Man Booker winner so far and didn’t have any preconceived expectations from Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. I found her style reminding me of a rare concoction of the styles of R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond. Although the narrative is set in the late 1980s there is contemporariness in the context: a senile old grandpa with a colonial hangover, typical old world aunties with their silly British accents, a convent bred teenager coming to terms with a world outside her own, a gutless Nepali who on one hand wishes to join his brethren and claim what is rightfully theirs and on the other hand lacks the courage to let go off his puppy love, an illegal immigrant in the US who leads a more miserable and wretched life than his poor father in India would have ever seen in his entire lifetime and a paradise called Kalimpong torn in pettiness of war.

The narrative is a bit slow especially when it veers away to Jemubhai Patel’s ancestry and Gyan’s family tree. However, the descriptions are so vivid that you can almost feel the picture grow in front of your eyes as you read it. The metaphors are so accurate that you jump at the comparisons and say “Didn’t I think of that too!”
Sample this excerpt:

“Unsuspecting of the approaching news, Lola was in her garden picking caterpillars off the English Broccoli. The caterpillars were mottled green and white with fake blue eyes, ridiculous fat feet, a tail and an elephant nose. Magnificent creatures, she thought, studying one closely, but then she threw it to a waiting bird that pecked and a green stuffing squiggled out of the caterpillar like toothpaste from a punctured tube.”
Déjà vu ! How many times would DJ have squished a caterpillar under his boots and exclaimed “Cibaca!” as a kid.

Kiran describes human nature so beautifully. Look at this gem:

"Cowardice needed its facade, its reasoning, like anything else if it was to be his life's priniciple. Contentment was no easy matter. One had to situate it cannily, camoulfage it, pretend it was something else."

The language is peppered with so many figures of speech that it is literally a hunting ground for English teachers (I can almost imagine Mrs. Aga jump at this book). Where words don’t suffice to paint the picture, sounds do, which seemed very Ruskin Bondesque. Despite the floweriness in the English, the liberal use of Hindi words keeps the feel very Indian. You can see flashes of R.K. Narayan in the heart wrenching, yet funny depiction of the characters: each one pretentious and yet so painfully human that you don’t whether to laugh or to cry because you see a reflection of your own mind in their foibles and contradictions: Gyan, who is so childlike in his need for love and doesn’t want to stand up to his calling; Biju, who despises the Americans and yet yearns to settle in America; the judge Jemubhai Patel, who cannot see beyond his microcosm of his dog Mutt and him, even as a war is tearing the landscape; Sai, who turns away at the abject poverty of her lover; Noni and Lola who fall off their high English horses when they see their opulent lifestyle shredded down to the bare minimal needs of survival during war. You sometimes wish these characters would rise above their frailties and become the heroes about whom books are written. But alas! The book is not about overnight saints, gun-totting heroes of war or a rags-to-riches success of illegal immigrants in the US. Like the title suggests, it is about loss and losers: loss of peace in paradise, loss of dignity, loss of direction, loss of love; yet it is not recounted like an elegy or a rant. It just leaves you with a medley of feelings.

I am not the one to judge whether the contents and context are universally appealing and I am not even aware if that is a criterion for a Booker. Even so, as an Indian reader, I would think it comes the closest to portraying the dichotomous state of the present Indian society and the Indian minds. It’s not a book meant to be read at a super fast pace in a superficial manner because it doesn’t have any dramatic turns or unexpected climax, it is slow paced like real life. It is meant to be savored and mulled over just like rolling your tongue on a mint and letting the flavor pervade all the taste buds.