Published 2006 / Length 324 pages
The triple locations of Desai’s book – the Himalayas in north-eastern India; New York; and Cambridge, England – reflect the multiple inheritances of contemporary Indians in a globalized, post-imperial world. Querying and gentle, but insistent in tone, The Inheritance of Loss examines the impact of economic subordination and the notion of cultural inferiority during and after the days of empire. Desai unearths the roots of British-educated judge Jemubhai’s rejection of his Indian heritage, exploring his self-loathing as he tries desperately to win approval, while fearing that he is inescapably different from the Westerners he would like to mimic.
Structured in snippets, the book could seem frustratingly episodic, but each little section contains a flash of revelation. Across the vast historical sweep of the book, Desai weaves a delicate, loose-knit tapestry of immense narrative scope, tugging together the strands. Quietly, determinedly, like the mist that seeps into and chills the tumbledown house on the hillside, the story insinuates its way into your imagination. Yet its reflections on hatred and humiliation remain ruthlessly exact.
‘[S]he describes the lives of people fated to experience modern life as a continuous affront to their notions of order, dignity and justice.’ – The New York Times
• The judge’s house is disintegrating – but is the ‘old order’ passing, or do new political relationships in our globalized world reproduce old patterns of domination?
• Consider the evolution of Gyan and Sai’s relationship. Why does the eventual outcome occur? Where do Gyan’s humiliation and hate spring from?
• Seeing the judge’s solitude as a student at Cambridge helps to explain some of his later behaviour, but does it excuse it?
• Does Sai offer hope for a better future?
• When The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker Prize in 2007, Desai was thirty-five – the youngest ever woman to take home the coveted award.
• Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, but has never won. As she accepted the £50,000 reward, Kiran declared: ‘To my mother I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine.’
• Dr Zhivago by BORIS PASTERNAK – a wonderfully evocative epic; a tale of the coming and passing of first love soured by the intrusion of political turmoil.
• Rebecca by DAPHNE DU MAURIER and Beloved by TONI MORRISON (see here and here, respectively) – both novels are set in atmospheric houses saturated with history.
• Brideshead Revisited by EVELYN WAUGH (see here) – the same wistful, elegiac tone, though Waugh’s vision of a lost past is more idealized.