'The Inheritance of Loss' - Book Review

Abstract

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, she lived in Delhi until she was 14, then spent a year in England, before her family moved to the USA. She completed her schooling in Massachusetts before attending Bennington College; Hollins University and Columbia University, where she studied creative writing, taking two years off to write 'Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.' Her mother is Anita Desai, author of many books, three of which have been short listed for the Booker Prize ('Clear Light of Day' (1980), 'In Custody' (1984) and 'Fasting, Feasting' (1999). Anita Desai currently teaches writing at MIT. Her maternal grandmother was German, but left before the World War II and never returned. Her grandfather was a refugee from Bangladesh. Her paternal grandparents came from Gujarat, and her grandfather was educated in England. Although Kiran has not lived in India since she was 14, she returns to the family home in Delhi every year. She first came to literary attention in 1997 when she was published in the New Yorker and in Mirrorwork, an anthology of 50 years of Indian writing edited by Salman Rushdie - Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard was the closing piece. In 1998, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which had taken four years to write, was published to good reviews. She says, 'I think my first book was filled with all that I loved most about India and knew I was in the inevitable process of losing. It was also very much a book that came from the happiness of realizing how much I loved to write.' Eight years later, 'The Inheritance of Loss' was published in early 2006, and won the 2006 Booker Prize. When talking of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss, and of her own life, she says, 'The characters of my story are entirely fictional, but these journeys (of her grandparents) as well as my own provided insight into what it means to travel between East and West and it is this I wanted to capture. The fact that I live this particular life is no accident. It was my inheritance.' 'The Inheritance of Loss' is set partly in India and partly in the USA. Desai describes it as a book that 'tries to capture what it means to live between East and West and what it means to be an immigrant,' and goes on to say that it also explores at a deeper level, 'what happens when a Western element is introduced into a country that is not of the West' - which happened during the British colonial days in India, and is happening again 'with India's new relationship with the States.' Her third aim was to write about, 'What happens when you take people from a poor country and place them in a wealthy one. How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere, a political sphere, over time?' As she says, 'These are old themes that continue to be relevant in today's world, the past informing the present, the present revealing the past.'