Recently Released
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Recently Caught
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Social Links
Bookish Quotes
"A library is thought in cold storage."
The Inheritance of Loss
|
The Inheritance of Loss
Buy from one of these Booksellers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
2 journalers for this copy...
|
Winner of the 2006 Booker Prize, fortuitously ordered from the Quality Paperback Book Club several weeks before the prize was announced.(Left: author Kiran Desai.) |
|
|
|
|
The Inheritance of Loss begins in 1986, and tells the story of Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, "the judge", who lives with his cook and his seventeen year old granddaughter, Sai Mistry, in a house called Cho Oyu in the hill station of Kalimpong in the Himalayan foothills. Born to a peasant family in 1919, Judge Patel was schooled at mission schools before winning scholarships to Bishop's College and Cambridge. Upon his return to India he became a member of the pre-independence Indian Civil Service.At the age of six Sai was sent to the convent of St. Augustine's, where her mother had also once been a student, while her Hindu mother and Zoroastrian father -- a member of the Indian Air Force -- relocated to Moscow, her father as a possible candidate for the Russian space program. By the time Sai was eight she hadn't seen her parents for two years, and when she received news they'd been crushed under the wheels of a bus in Moscow she could barely remember them (later Sai is described as the "orphan child of India's failing romance with the Soviets"). At seventeen, Sai still lives with her grandfather and his cook at Cho Oyu, and is romantically involved with Gyan, her mathematics tutor. Judge Patel's cook has been a widower for seventeen years -- his wife died when their son, Biju, was five. Biju, now nineteen, lives in New York City where he works illegally for a series of restaurants. Older lady neighbours Noni and Lola live in a rose-covered cottage called Mon Ami. One a spinster and the other a widow, Lola's daughter Piyali "Pixie" Bannerji is a reporter with BBC World News, living in London. The characters coexist in relative harmony, until the peace in Kalimpong is threatened by Nepalese insurgents. Thus The Inheritance of Loss is about independence and counter-independence movements, the multi-generational fall-out of the Indian diaspora, colonization, globalization, disappointment and -- as the title suggests -- loss. This is a true twenty-first century novel, full of insight and critical commentary about the state of the world, and full of compassion for its characters. Highly recommended. (Top left: Kiran Desai wins the 2006 Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Journal Entry 4 by
|
|
|
|
