A Deeply-Felt Chronicle of the Dispossessed
Written: Mar 01 '07 (Updated Mar 01 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: precise, evocative prose; beautifully-expressed ideas; times/places conjured up with immediacy and utter believability
Cons: depressing
The Bottom Line: Passionate, sweeping evocation of the Indian immigrant experience, from time of the Raj to present day. Desai's prose shimmers as she chronicles the lives and choices of the dispossessed.
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| jc_hall's Full Review: Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss |
Orphaned as a young child, Sai is sent to Cho Oyu, a crumbling mansion in Kalimpong in the foothills of the Himalayas, to live with her grandfather, a retired Indian judge. The Cook, the judge’s retainer, looks out for Sai as best he can while worrying incessantly about his son Biju who has travelled to the United States where he works as an illegal immigrant in a series of restaurant kitchens. As Sai grows to adulthood, she falls in love with her tutor Gyan, a Nepalese boy who, though at first infatuated with her, becomes increasingly caught up in the post-colonial Nepalese political movement. As the insurgents gain power at the expense of the Indians, the latter experience a reversal of fortunes—the bourgeois Anglophile Indians begin to lose their superiority and finally see themselves as despised as they always were by their less-privileged countrymen.
The novel’s narrative weaves together the different threads of Sai and Biju’s separate lives in Kalimpong and New York in the 80s, as well as the judge’s earlier life in England in the 40s. It is a testament to the author’s skills that these disparate threads blend seamlessly one into the other. While Sai’s narrative is emotionally involving (and the descriptions of the Himalayas breath-taking), it is Biju’s stark existence in the bowels of New York that seize the reader by the throat, hectoring: ‘Now do you see? This is how immigrants from the Third World live in one of the wealthiest nation on Earth. This is how they scrape by, making a living in barely habitable circumstances.’ The poverty, the sheer destitution and despair of the immigrant workers who live and sleep in atrocious conditions are palpable, such is the power of Desai’s descriptions.
More often than not, Biju works in the basement kitchens of cordon bleu restaurants where the kitchen staff downstairs are all third-world immigrants labouring to feed the first-world customers upstairs. Such is this modern world of ours, touted for its globalism and multiculturalism, where ‘one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king’. And thus the author chronicles the lives and the soul-destroying choices made by Indian immigrants across the generations, from Sai’s grandfather who studied in England in the forties, scarred by racism and learning to hate himself and his fellow Indians, to the modern immigrants like Biju, some of whom actually ‘make it’, accumulating wealth in the form of big houses and cars, only to incur the scorn of their fellow men.
An intelligent and deeply-felt chronicle of the dispossessed, both the foreign-educated elite living an anachronistic existence in post-colonial India and those seeking better opportunities in the New World in the late 20th century, The Inheritance of Loss is fierce and tender by turns, as Kirin Desai uncovers an immigrant experience that defies commonly-held views. Far from benefiting from the wealth and opportunities of the First World, many immigrants are exploited, down-trodden and haunted by their dreams of home, their longing for their fragmented families, their futile hopes of acceptance and their desperate need to belong in a country not their own.
In choosing a passage from Jorge Luis Borges as the epigraph to her novel, of which one line reads: ‘My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.’, Desai is communicating to the reader her empathy for the people she describes so well. Nor is it only their physical poverty that concerns her. It is also the lack of humanity shown by those who come into contact with the immigrants, the want of compassion, the deficiency or sheer absence of good will. Perhaps Desai is intimating that, for people to live in such dire circumstances, for such a huge gap in the rich-poor divide to exist in a country that considers itself advanced and developed, is no less than an affront to humanity. This reader is inclined to agree.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jc_hall
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Member: JC Hall
Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 199
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Going back to Vancouver for Christmas! Happy Holidays, everyone!!
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