The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai, 2006
384 pages
Read in 2022.01
check synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Intro and review summary 🔽
✔ Life in Kalimpong, India, historical fiction
✔ Class struggle and love story
✔ Gurkha movement and immigration
★★★★★+♥ One person is so small and can be crashed in a second, so is there any hope? In spring the Himalaya brings fragile hope, but with the rain it makes everything rotten. We live at the mercy of something we cannot control. Powerful.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Recommended by a friend so I realised only later that it was in Kalimpong.
Through eyes of a well to do orphan girl, it looks at Gurkhaland movement in a non-romantic way; how we live in our own imagination - and how the reality bites back in nonchalant tone.
The orphan girl starts to live with her grandfather, who eats Indian food with a knife and fork, in a big house with his cook/servant.
She falls in love with a young man amid the violent Gurkha movement, and at the same time on the other side of the world the cook's son is fed up with his life in NY that's going nowhere.
One person is so small and can be crashed in a second, so in the end, is there any equality, understanding, or hope?
Everything changes, except for one thing; the Himalayas.
In spring it brings fragile hope, but the rain makes everything rotten, and we all live at the mercy of something we cannot control.
It's a feeling you get when you are in India, you physically feel some superior power, something much bigger than life.
It is comical at times but tragic in a subtle and unkind way. Powerful.
🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽
●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●
The Inheritance of Loss
●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
Eredi della sconfitta (Italiano)
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