THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

Name: THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
Author: Kiran Desai
ISBN: 0-87113-929-4

by Kiran Desai ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2006

Less a compelling narrative than a rich stew of ironies and contradictions. Desai’s eye for the ridiculous is as keen as...

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Desai’s somber second novel (a marked contrast to her highly acclaimed comic fable Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, 1998) looks at cultural dislocation as experienced by an unhappy Indian ménage.

In a once-sturdy house in Kalimpong, in the spectacular Himalayan foothills, live an old judge, his dog and his 17-year-old granddaughter Sai; in a nearby shack is the household’s linchpin, the wretchedly underpaid cook. The judge and Sai are “estranged Indians” who converse in English, knowing little Hindi. The judge’s estrangement began as a student in England. He envied the English and despised Indians, slathering powder over his too-brown skin, rejecting his peasant father; back in India, he could be hideously cruel to his wife, indirectly causing her death. He tolerates Sai (her Westernized parents were killed in an accident in the Soviet Union), but true love is reserved for his dog, Mutt. The year is 1985, and some young Nepali-Indian militants (“unleashed Bruce Lee fans”) are fighting for their own state; they invade the judge’s home and steal his rifles, after being tipped off by Sai’s tutor Gyan, torn between his newfound ethnic loyalties and his delicate courtship of Sai. Meanwhile, in New York, the cook’s son Biju, an illegal, is doing menial restaurant work; the cook, who clings to old superstitions while dreaming of electric toasters, had pushed him to emigrate. Desai employs a kaleidoscopic technique to illuminate fractured lives in Kalimpong, Manhattan and India, past and present. She finds a comic bounce in Biju’s troubles even as Kalimpong turns grimmer; young rebels die, the police torture the innocent, Sai and Gyan’s romance dissolves into recriminations and Mutt is stolen. We are left with two images of love: the hateful judge, now heartbroken, beseeching a chaotic world for help in retrieving Mutt, and the returning Biju, loyal son, loyal Indian, hurtling into his father’s arms.

Less a compelling narrative than a rich stew of ironies and contradictions. Desai’s eye for the ridiculous is as keen as ever.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006

ISBN: 0-87113-929-4

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
New Novel by Kiran Desai Coming Next Fall

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.