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Kiran Desai is the winner of the coveted Man Booker Prize 2006 for her novel, The Inheritance of Loss published by Hamish Hamilton. At 35, Kiran Desai is the youngest ever woman of the prestigious £50,000 prize.
The Indian-born writer has a strong family tie with the prize as her mother Anita Desai has been shortlisted three times since 1980 but has never won. This year, however, her daughter, Kiran, has won the acclaimed literary prize.
Desai is the first woman to win the Man Booker since 2000 when Margaret Atwood scooped the prize with The Blind Assassin. Her winning book, The Inheritance of Loss, is a radiant, funny and moving family saga and has been described by reviewers as ‘the best, sweetest, most delightful novel’.
Announcing the winner, Chair of the judges, Hermione Lee, said, “We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006 is Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness. The winner was chosen, after a long, passionate and generous debate, from a shortlist of five other strong and original voices.” |
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The other books nominated for the literary award were Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, M J Hyland’s Carry Me Down, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk and Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch.
The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is Kiran Desai’s second novel after her brilliant first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), which won the Betty Trask Award. Set in a corner of the Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life, Kiran Desai’s Booker-prize winning novel is about belonging and estrangement, exile and homecoming.
Kiran Desai’s new novel The Inheritance of Loss runs through, continents, generations, cultures, religions and races. Like her much acclaimed first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, this too is set in India. Primarily in the remote northeast Indian town of Kalimpong during the mid 1980’s.
From the very first sentence, Desai establishes the landscape as the central character. Running parallel to a fascinating plot, the landscape is where “All day the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountain possessed of ocean shadows and depths…Kanchenjunga was a far peak whitted out of ice…a plume of snow blown high by the winds at it summit”. Here in the foothills of the Himalayas, 16-year-old Sai lives with her grandfather, an irascible retired judge, his cook, and his dog…”
The novel centers around, the 16-year-old Sai, an orphan sent to live with her reclusive grandfather, a retired judge. He ‘who does not want her and who offers no solace’ however strikes up an apparent attachment to his granddaughter - perhaps because she is a lot like him, a westernized Indian, an “estranged Indian living in India”. Sai’s brief romance with her, slightly older, Nepali tutor, Gyan adds a breath of fresh air to the narrative. Soon however their relationship is enveloped by the politics of the moment
even as they play “the game of courtship”. In the backdrop of the violent GNLF movement, ideologies clash as “a feeling of martyrdom “ comes over Gyan, who unwittingly readies to “sacrifice kisses for his adulthood”. And for Sai, her comfortable, Anglicized world ‘that seemed to protect (her) like a blanket was the very thing that (now) left (her) exposed.
However, arguably the most poignant moments in the book are the descriptions of the cook and his son Biju. Working in a series of deadened jobs in New York restaurants, epitomizing the plight of the the illegal immigrant-he who has no future in his own country and neither in another. Suffering additional pressures, of being a son “working” in America, Biju is always flooded with requests from his father to help fellow immigrants. Desai provides scenes of dark humour and wit, when a character in the book paints the act of immigration as: “Immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite: that it was cowardice that led many to America: fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty…where you never heard the demands of servants, bankrupt relatives…where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous”.
Above everything else, The Inheritance of Loss is a tender depiction of love and loss. The losses each character endures and their desperate attempts to fit in. The fact of exile and how that exile affects the notion of home, how it colours perception and how it heightens the sense of wanting to belong, are strong currents that run through the novel. With a keen eye for detail, Desai captures the idiosyncrasies of the characters, without passing moral judgments. Her protagonists are marked by a certain passivity and are often swept away by historical and social forces rather than being able to face and
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control them. Her vivid picturisation of Father Booty, a foreigner who thinks himself an Indian, the anglophile sisters, living off kirsch chocolate, the refugee Afghan princess, presents the face of a broad cross section of society.
The book offers all of the pleasures of traditional narrative in a form and a voice that are utterly fresh. Desai has the ‘naturalness of Tolstoy, yet it's as quick and quirky . Her rich and often wry descriptions -- of people, places, weather, seasons - have the depth and resonance of Dickensian writing laced with rueful postmodern ambivalence’.
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Her insights into human nature, have traces of her mother, Anita Desai’s writing;where the latter writes "My novels are no reflection of Indian society, politics or character. They are my private attempt to seize upon the raw material of life."
Desai writes in a style that is languid and beautiful, with delightful turns of phrase. She even captures nature with a certain kind of verve, when she describes the “Sunset doing a mad Kali”. In a generous vision, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always characteristic. Like Arundhati Roy’s portrait of a slice of Kerala life in The God of Small Things, Desai too captures the grace of life in this sleepy hill town illuminating the consequences of colonialism and global conflicts of religion, race and nationalism in Kalimpong.
Reviewed by Sanjukta Sen
Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee |
