Quickie book review \u00c2\u2013 I’m-on-the-road edition<\/b><\/p>\n\n
Kiran Desai\u00c2\u2019s new book, The Inheritance Of Loss<\/a>,<\/i> soft-launched last month, and I picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble. It\u00c2\u2019s a good tale with a globalization undercurrent connecting India\u00c5\u00bds Nepal border with New York City.<\/p>\n\n Her previous book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,<\/i> was a well-written magically realist vignette on the line between a novel and a novella. Despite the fruitarian title, it was excellent. Her new one is far more ambitious. Rushdie has a highly complimentary but generic blurb on the back of the new one, which I take to mean he hasn’t read the new one yet. Only having read her mom Anita Desai’s Booker-nominated work Fasting, Feasting<\/i> so far, I\u00c2\u2019d say I enjoy her writing more than her mother\u00c2\u2019s (whose work I also enjoy).<\/p>\n\n She also gets in a bunch of wicked jabs at non-vegetarians, Brits, upper-class New Yorkers, 2nd genners and so on, she\u00c2\u2019s not playing safe here. It\u00c2\u2019s mutinous that way, just like The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories<\/a><\/i> by Lavanya Sankaran.<\/p>\n\n (Desai is a far better show-not-tell writer \u00c2\u2014 I liked Carpet<\/i> because it\u00c2\u2019s sassy, and I could completely relate to all the jabs at 2nd gen dating; it\u00c5\u00bds like an American version of Life Isn\u00c2\u2019t All Ha Ha Hee Hee.<\/i> Also, she\u00c5\u00bds an ex-WSJ<\/i>er and seems to be a conservative, which I mention only to boost sales in the Vinod – Razib segment. Sankaran\u00c5\u00bds biggest f*-you goes out to Mumbaikars who look down on Bangalore, but she\u00c5\u00bds riding the outsourcing publicity wave, so it isn’t quite the declaration of independence it seems.)<\/p>\n\n My complaints:<\/p>\n\n Otherwise, highly recommended. Flippant, funny and mutinous as all hell. Sometimes a treatise rather than a novel, but much less so than Carpet,<\/i> and that makes it all the more entertaining– frankly, there’s a lot to be said.<\/p>\n\n Desai is reading in Manhattan Feb. 1 at the Rubin Museum of Art<\/a>, a major Himalayan art collection (via SAJA<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quickie book review \u00c2\u2013 I’m-on-the-road edition Kiran Desai\u00c2\u2019s new book, The Inheritance Of Loss, soft-launched last month, and I picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble. It\u00c2\u2019s a good tale with a globalization undercurrent connecting India\u00c5\u00bds Nepal border with … Continue reading