A worthwhile read
Jan. 7th, 2009 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jawnbcWhile on our cruise I read Kiran Desai's Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss. And I must say it is a great book and a great read. I did find a couple of bits not to my liking, but even those were a matter of taste rather than quality.
Desai's story is about the detached Indian: those who've embraced the West, English as their first language, and view much of what around them with a sense of distance and displacement. The protagonist is the daughter of 2 such persons, long dead, and lives in the Himalayan hinterland with her maternal grandfather. Sharing their lives are a number of others, including their houseman/cook, a number of equally detached persons, and the odd ex-pat (Swiss, Tibetan, Afghani). The region hold increasing tensions between its indigenous communities and mainstream (ostensibly Hindu) Indian society.
Desai eschews traditional narrative temporality and switches--defty--between the present and past. We learn of her childhood, how her parents met and died, and the circumstances under which her grandfather ends up at OxBridge. This approach isn't novel, but her ability to weave the inner dialogue of characters into the story is remarkable: often such inner thoughts read incredulously. Alice Munro would be impressed.
This book takes on history, post-colonialism, racism, the caste system, love, and identity. It offers no offensively simplistic explanations for these experiences. But it remains a smart, readable, often wry story.
Recommended, without reseervation.
Desai's story is about the detached Indian: those who've embraced the West, English as their first language, and view much of what around them with a sense of distance and displacement. The protagonist is the daughter of 2 such persons, long dead, and lives in the Himalayan hinterland with her maternal grandfather. Sharing their lives are a number of others, including their houseman/cook, a number of equally detached persons, and the odd ex-pat (Swiss, Tibetan, Afghani). The region hold increasing tensions between its indigenous communities and mainstream (ostensibly Hindu) Indian society.
Desai eschews traditional narrative temporality and switches--defty--between the present and past. We learn of her childhood, how her parents met and died, and the circumstances under which her grandfather ends up at OxBridge. This approach isn't novel, but her ability to weave the inner dialogue of characters into the story is remarkable: often such inner thoughts read incredulously. Alice Munro would be impressed.
This book takes on history, post-colonialism, racism, the caste system, love, and identity. It offers no offensively simplistic explanations for these experiences. But it remains a smart, readable, often wry story.
Recommended, without reseervation.
