The Inheritance of Loss - My Reading

I just finished "The Inheritance of Loss" (TIL) by Kiran Desai. Read a couple of reviews here, and here. And a strong and outraged response here (you may have to scroll down a bit).

The book is an excellent read. It's maybe one of the most meaningful books that I've read for a long time. Don;t get me wrong, Arundhatti Roy's "The God of Small Things" was also a good read, but that story was about a specific family and a specific set of characters. On the other hand TIL has a characters that are generic. The experiences of the characters as they stumble and prod along the story is one of generic experience. The experience of the poor, of the immigrant, of the confused elite, of the educated elite who hate their own kind, of the opportunist students who get out of the squalid and poverty stricken town of their own country and look down upon those left behind. Things that all of us have done to some extent one time or another.

There are two parallel stories running through it, but connected. One is the story in Kalingpong and the other in NY. I think that whatever racism or colonial thinking that the critics saw in the book is mistaken, because it is the characters that are racist and colonial, not the author herself. The critics vilifying the author is akin to shooting the messenger for the message.

Reading through the book, I did come across a lot of characters that I've seen and come across. A lot of incidents, little ones, that have occur ed to me. I have seen my own reflection in some of the characters, and the reflection of some of the people I see daily and some of the stories that I've heard. The author is a shrewd observer of the human story, she writes about the immigrant's confusion and the elite mentality of the rich as she sees it.

The only complain that I would make is that "kukri" should be written "khukuri" and it definitely is not a sickle. It evolved off a sickle, bit it is not a sickle. And the other taste that I got off the book is that the author sees no redeeming quality in any of the characters, she hates both East and West, the poor and the elite, the educated and the ignorant with equal fervour.

But when all is said and done, I definitely recommend this book.