A Leaden Spring

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai


Somehow I neglected this sharp, adept novel, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2006.  Good thing it caught my eye at Powell's (bastion of all things literary) this winter.  I started this book on a snowy night in Boston, but it has taken me this long to finish it due to various book ADD mishaps.

In the tradition of many flourishy but sociologically ruthless writers before her (ahem, Arundhati Roy), Desai creates a book full of downtrodden but ultimately hopeful characters, who live, love and die in politically unstable India. Centered in Darjeeling, Northeast India, in the 1980s, which is the stage of the Gorka National Liberation Front.  The GNLF led insurgencies to reclaim lands that retreating British generals partitioned with little care for consequence.  Mostly though, the story is about Sai, a young woman whose parents have been killed in a car accident, and Sai then returns to her estranged grandfather's house to live under the shadow of the Himalaya.  She falls in love with her math tutor, Gyan, who leaves Sai to fight for the GNLF, and morals become muddled when Gyan betrays Sai's fragile family.  Also intertwined are sharp historical bits about Sai's grandfather, an Oxford educated judge, as well as the narrative of the hapless cook, who sends his son to America to become successful although the son soon finds out Indians in America have a difficult time ascending to the golden top of the American Dream.  Desai writes with a lyric juxtaposition of the beautiful and the profane.  Fantastic author.  Joyful book.