The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
Summary
A decaying house called Cho Oyu sits below Kanchenjunga near Kalimpong, in the Indian Himalaya. In it live a retired judge who despises almost everything including himself, his orphaned sixteen year old granddaughter Sai, an elderly cook, and a dog the judge loves more than any person. Outside, a Nepali insurgency is beginning, and the boys who come to the house for guns include the young man teaching Sai mathematics.
Interleaved with this is the cook's son Biju, moving between basement kitchens in New York, undocumented and moving jobs whenever immigration is mentioned, while his father tells everyone in Kalimpong that he is doing well.
Desai is writing about what colonialism leaves behind in a personality. The judge was sent to Cambridge as a young man, was humiliated there, and has spent fifty years being English at people who cannot escape him. The novel is quietly savage about him and entirely unsentimental about the insurgents too.
It moves slowly and the two strands never quite converge in the way a reader expects. Come for the writing, which is precise and often beautiful, and for a study of humiliation that very few novels attempt. The ending offers no resolution and is not meant to.
A good companion to Jhumpa Lahiri or to Rohinton Mistry, and a rewarding book for anyone interested in what an empire does to the people it educates. Expect to be moved by the cook and irritated by almost everyone else, which is the arrangement Desai intends. It is a novel of atmosphere rather than incident, and the Himalayan setting is rendered with unusual precision.
Historical Context & Significance
The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker Prize in 2006. Kiran Desai was thirty five, the youngest woman to win it at that point, and the third writer born in India to take it.
The judges were chaired by Hermione Lee, with Simon Armitage, Candia McWilliam, Anthony Quinn and Fiona Shaw.
There is a family dimension that gave the result its emotional charge. Desai's mother is the novelist Anita Desai, who was shortlisted for the Booker three times and never won, and who was in the room. Kiran Desai dedicated the book to her.
The novel provoked protest in Kalimpong itself, where some readers objected to the portrayal of the Gorkhaland agitation and of the town, and the local reception remained hostile for years after the international acclaim.