What is it about?
This iconic novel, that won the Booker Prize in 2006, is Desai’s sophomore effort. The Inheritance of Loss is a novel that radiates atmosphere from its opening pages — a damp, misty, decaying Kalimpong that mirrors its characters’ emotional landscapes almost too well. Kiran Desai writes with sharp observational intelligence, and the book’s central preoccupation — how colonial hangovers, migration, aspiration, and humiliation shape ordinary lives — is handled with confidence and fluency. The narrative moves between Sai and her retired judge grandfather in Kalimpong, and Biju navigating the immigrant underbelly of New York, stitching together two forms of displacement: the genteel, half-remembered loss of status in India and the brutal invisibility of economic migrants abroad. And we are saying nothing of the dog.
What keeps the book alive is Desai’s tone: wry, unsentimental, and often edged with dark humour. Characters cling to dignity in the most absurd ways, and the book is at its best when it exposes the comedy of self-delusion and the tragedy embedded within that comedy.
What we really like!
Desai’s prose is effortlessly sharp. She captures the texture of social embarrassment, the quiet violence of class resentment, and the loneliness of migration with a deftness that feels almost casual. The novel’s dark humour is one of its strongest assets: characters often reveal themselves most clearly in moments of petty vanity, misplaced pride, or sudden absurdity. The judge’s internal decay, Sai’s emotional awkwardness, the farcical pretensions of Kalimpong’s elite, and Biju’s survivalist misadventures — all are framed with a humour that feels organic rather than imposed. There are moments you would laugh and then guilt yourself for having guffawed. That’s how dark and efficient the prose is.The atmospheric writing is superb; the setting becomes a character with its own sad, comic dignity. Structurally, the novel makes smart parallels between the different exiles its characters inhabit.
What could be better.
For all its brilliance in passages, the novel never fully coheres. You are left wanting a bit despite all the accumulating the emotional force that the narrative gains as it rushes to its end. The American chapters are weaker compared to the Kalimpong: not because what they say is not impactful or untrue, but they lack the originality that the Indian side of the story has in abundance. The political backdrop sometimes feels sketched sometimes: again that is also what Desai seems to aim for- the absurdity, the everyday cruelties from characters out of their depth in history: but some might feel that Inheritance of Loss is a book full of dazzling fragments rather than a complete emotional arc.
Why you should read it
Read this if you want a novel that captures the contradictions of postcolonial India without resorting to neat resolutions. Desai is exceptional at portraying the comedy and cruelty of aspiration — the gap between who people think they are and who the world allows them to be. The novel’s dark humour makes it particularly memorable; it softens the bleakness without trivialising it. Readers interested in migration, class anxiety, or the emotional aftershocks of empire will find a great deal here. And even if the book doesn’t sometimes fully reach the greatness it hints at, the writing is strong enough to make the journey stay with you for a long time.
Score: 8.75 / 10
Babel School of Languages 