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3.31 AVERAGE
3.31 AVERAGE
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Racism, Sexual assault
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Just because a book is written with the flair of a Man Booker winner doesn't mean it should win.
The Inheritance of Loss is densely packed with a bustling crowd of unlikeable characters, burdened with a sense of loss - fulfilling the namesake of the novel. Regardless of what form of loss however (victimisation, absence, regret, guilt, or just genuine suffering), I didn't feel compelled or sympathetic to any of them. Almost all of the characters are bad people. A lot of the time, bad people make for great characters. That's not the case here: they're all uninteresting and genuinely off-putting.
Sai's rushed fling with her pre-radicalised tutor is nothing short of cringeworthy, Biju's struggle to make it in New York is outright boring and the judge's unrivaled, furious hatred of humanity surpasses repugnance.
And it's not like I don't enjoy stories of remorseful protagonists: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (another Man Booker winner) is one of my favourite books of all time. Flanagan's knack for anticlimactic storytelling shines there, bringing out much more interesting characters and a deeper sense of loss than Desai's winner here. But I will acknowledge that Flanagan was much further along than Desai at the time of TNRTTDN's release.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review though, Desai does write with the flair of a Man Booker winner. The heat of Indian conflict is conveyed admirably, and her gritty and sometimes gruesome descriptions are this novel's most commendable feature.
But at the end of the day, despite how well-written The Inheritance of Loss is, it isn't interesting, inspiring, or entertaining.
The Inheritance of Loss is densely packed with a bustling crowd of unlikeable characters, burdened with a sense of loss - fulfilling the namesake of the novel. Regardless of what form of loss however (victimisation, absence, regret, guilt, or just genuine suffering), I didn't feel compelled or sympathetic to any of them. Almost all of the characters are bad people. A lot of the time, bad people make for great characters. That's not the case here: they're all uninteresting and genuinely off-putting.
Sai's rushed fling with her pre-radicalised tutor is nothing short of cringeworthy, Biju's struggle to make it in New York is outright boring and the judge's unrivaled, furious hatred of humanity surpasses repugnance.
And it's not like I don't enjoy stories of remorseful protagonists: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (another Man Booker winner) is one of my favourite books of all time. Flanagan's knack for anticlimactic storytelling shines there, bringing out much more interesting characters and a deeper sense of loss than Desai's winner here. But I will acknowledge that Flanagan was much further along than Desai at the time of TNRTTDN's release.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review though, Desai does write with the flair of a Man Booker winner. The heat of Indian conflict is conveyed admirably, and her gritty and sometimes gruesome descriptions are this novel's most commendable feature.
But at the end of the day, despite how well-written The Inheritance of Loss is, it isn't interesting, inspiring, or entertaining.
Despite a title that suggests a somewhat dour read, Desai's novel is a frequently hilarious, incredibly personable yet ultimately bleak look at life in a remote Indian village which finds itself frequently on the sharp edge of border disputes and unrest following the end of direct British rule. Despite being clearly set at a specific time in history, the problems these characters face of class, immigration, and returning home are universal. It's not a novel of poverty and disaster, as many of the great contemporary Indian novels are, but strikes just as strong a chord. These characters have the luxury of choice, and the pain of having to live with these choices.
Um. It's about northeastern India, an area I know next to nothing about. It won the Booker Prize. I'm not sure why. Lots of pretty flowery language that sometimes was nice on the page, but not very memorable after the fact. I basically thought she tried too hard to fluff/prettify things up, instead of just telling the damn story. She cuts back and forth between India and an immigrant in New York City (illegal and working under the table in various kitchens around the city, surrounded by other illegal immigrants from third world countries all over the world) - the NYC sections were most evocative and moving for me. *shrug* So-called "literary fiction" is often just not my thing - it's too pretentious and self-aware for me. And I like *plot*, which makes me disgustingly old-fashioned.
Not for me. The characters are terrible vehicles for the slow and miserable story, and I struggled to see the point of why I was reading this and wanted to put it down about a quarter of the way through. I'm okay with cynicism, but the entire book felt totally devoid of love and hope and the human relationships were shallow. I didn't know who or what to root for. The dialogue was often very pretentious. I liked Desai's writing style sometimes but it often felt overworked. She makes great points about the Indian immigrant and colonialist and post-colonialist experiences, but some of her negative cultural commentaries got repetitive and annoying. I also enjoyed familiar references to National Geographic inflatable globes and M&S underwear (some things haven't changed since the book was written). Overall, this book was dull and exhausting and I wouldn't recommend it.
I'm giving up on this one. I simply cannot force myself to read something that gives me so little pleasure. It was just boring.
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
informative
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
As a generation of Indian citizens which has grown up in the adolescent years of globalisation, we are aware of how integral elements of foreign culture and identity are in our day to day existence. From brands and products, to cultural symbols, to the template of dreams have strong forces of lifestyles, like American consumerism, influenced and continue to shape our existence. But this is not just happening post the seeds of globalisation sowing. India's present is shaped by its colonial and imperialist past. We cannot deny the effect it had in directing the course of Indian economical and social development. Whether the aggregation of effects is for good or bad is what this book talks about - through its characters which act as fulcra about how people in an independent India did not simply revert to a "free" state of mind but went through an identity confusion. The story revolves around the sampled experiences of how lives of post-1950 India's and how they coped with defining what their role was in the after-effects of free India.
The thematic keystone connecting all the characters are their different attitudes towards what foreign culture meant for them. Their attitudes defined changes towards their own lifestyle, their pursuits and even the fundamental sense of right and wrong. In controlling not just India but creating a "Commonwealth" repository for themselves had proved their technological superiority. Colonial people like Indians had to acknowledge it, adjust to its presence before they could imagine an identity separate from it. To me, it appears as a macrocosmic versions of how a superior, competing, foreign identity causes a reaction in ours. Upon realising the lack of egotistic satisfaction due to the impossibility of victory over our enemy, we are faced with two choices - acceptance or denial. Acceptance will usually cause a comparison of the kind which asks us to compensate for what we are missing, in covering up for our flaws and imbibing the strengths of our ideological enemy. Denial on the other hand would probably trigger frustration, hostility and a resolution to advertise the irreconcilability of our ideological polarity. Acceptance will create a feeling of worship and a desire to be identified in the same colours as our challenger. Denial, on the other hand, will try to create a false sense of superiority and demand isolation of some sort to forget about the undermining gap between establishing any real superiority. But human nature is a culture of convenient contradictions and here also, between the two logical extremes lies the humane spectrum of choices, something which our characters here so poignantly portray through their overreaching-but-always-falling-short lives.
Jemubhai Patel is a judge who has studied in England and despite seeing the perceived inferiority of his Indian status, leans towards the accepting side and wants to be identified as an outlier from the backwardness that he despises in his native origins. He accrues resentment towards his indigenous identity and does everything to isolate himself from signals which remind him of his humble origins. The cook that the judge employs is another such specimen who identifies the potential of what everything outside India has to offer and associates a make-believe opportunistic existence out of his humble reach. His satisfaction and capacity to dream lives only through his son, Biju, who is the wanderer in the more modern, more charming American dream. The cook is ready to accept the sad limitations of what he every will be only through the future that he conjures up for his son thousand kilometres away and the obvious lack of realism that it causes. Biju on the other hand is existing in a contradictory plane of how he is living and how he wants to live. He resents the foreign culture which has so much to offer but he somehow is unable to reach and grab hold of it. And he resent his native culture which has its meagreness and infantile developmental confusion to offer up for grabs and which he escaped. He is unable to let go of parts of his identity that he values preciously like an artefact which one knows values nothing in reality but has immense significance due to one's choice to preserving it. Sai, the judge's granddaughter, and other people she is friends with are examples of the adoring kind which values the promises and lifestyle of foreigners for what it's worth. Their identity is magnetised by all those symbols of modernity and their life a pursuit to distinguish themselves by adopting what they feel is clearly superior. Like Jemubhai, they derive a personal satisfaction in differentiating elements of their own identity and their privilege in doing so. Finally, Gyan represents the other hostile reactionary who latches on to the convenient blame that associates one's plight to the existence of the superior culture. He also conveniently accepts the advantages that the other side has to offer and has to be mobilised by some sort of collective identity and individual guilt which comes when betraying fragments of one's original identity. There are many things to love about this book - its quotable gems, the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly, the grand feeling of sorrow which is only rendered by powerful books, its above mentioned tragedy of intertwined fates, and probably most powerfully, this consistency about how other cultures have influenced and defined trends in Indian choices and identities from before we even arrived.
The thematic keystone connecting all the characters are their different attitudes towards what foreign culture meant for them. Their attitudes defined changes towards their own lifestyle, their pursuits and even the fundamental sense of right and wrong. In controlling not just India but creating a "Commonwealth" repository for themselves had proved their technological superiority. Colonial people like Indians had to acknowledge it, adjust to its presence before they could imagine an identity separate from it. To me, it appears as a macrocosmic versions of how a superior, competing, foreign identity causes a reaction in ours. Upon realising the lack of egotistic satisfaction due to the impossibility of victory over our enemy, we are faced with two choices - acceptance or denial. Acceptance will usually cause a comparison of the kind which asks us to compensate for what we are missing, in covering up for our flaws and imbibing the strengths of our ideological enemy. Denial on the other hand would probably trigger frustration, hostility and a resolution to advertise the irreconcilability of our ideological polarity. Acceptance will create a feeling of worship and a desire to be identified in the same colours as our challenger. Denial, on the other hand, will try to create a false sense of superiority and demand isolation of some sort to forget about the undermining gap between establishing any real superiority. But human nature is a culture of convenient contradictions and here also, between the two logical extremes lies the humane spectrum of choices, something which our characters here so poignantly portray through their overreaching-but-always-falling-short lives.
Jemubhai Patel is a judge who has studied in England and despite seeing the perceived inferiority of his Indian status, leans towards the accepting side and wants to be identified as an outlier from the backwardness that he despises in his native origins. He accrues resentment towards his indigenous identity and does everything to isolate himself from signals which remind him of his humble origins. The cook that the judge employs is another such specimen who identifies the potential of what everything outside India has to offer and associates a make-believe opportunistic existence out of his humble reach. His satisfaction and capacity to dream lives only through his son, Biju, who is the wanderer in the more modern, more charming American dream. The cook is ready to accept the sad limitations of what he every will be only through the future that he conjures up for his son thousand kilometres away and the obvious lack of realism that it causes. Biju on the other hand is existing in a contradictory plane of how he is living and how he wants to live. He resents the foreign culture which has so much to offer but he somehow is unable to reach and grab hold of it. And he resent his native culture which has its meagreness and infantile developmental confusion to offer up for grabs and which he escaped. He is unable to let go of parts of his identity that he values preciously like an artefact which one knows values nothing in reality but has immense significance due to one's choice to preserving it. Sai, the judge's granddaughter, and other people she is friends with are examples of the adoring kind which values the promises and lifestyle of foreigners for what it's worth. Their identity is magnetised by all those symbols of modernity and their life a pursuit to distinguish themselves by adopting what they feel is clearly superior. Like Jemubhai, they derive a personal satisfaction in differentiating elements of their own identity and their privilege in doing so. Finally, Gyan represents the other hostile reactionary who latches on to the convenient blame that associates one's plight to the existence of the superior culture. He also conveniently accepts the advantages that the other side has to offer and has to be mobilised by some sort of collective identity and individual guilt which comes when betraying fragments of one's original identity. There are many things to love about this book - its quotable gems, the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly, the grand feeling of sorrow which is only rendered by powerful books, its above mentioned tragedy of intertwined fates, and probably most powerfully, this consistency about how other cultures have influenced and defined trends in Indian choices and identities from before we even arrived.