the inheritance of loss
When I was young and read a lot, wedged between my bed and the wall, I would not let myself look at the back of the books because I didn’t want to know what the plot was. It seemed to cheapen the story even then to sum it up as a plot. A book to me even then wasn’t about that — it was about falling into another space, getting inside another person’s head, being filled with language.
When I’m on long car rides with Rosie and Steve, we get books on tape that tend to be mysteries with a plotline that makes time scurry: quick to the end to see who did it, quick Illinois, Iowa, disappear Ohio. But I need Rosie and Steve to tell me what’s happening: I can’t follow plot very well. I get caught up in the cornfields, then pulled into the language, tone, the funny voice of the narrator and what accent he uses per character and whether or not he sticks to it. I wonder where the paragraphs are, I think about kinds of clouds, I wonder when the next McDonald’s is and what the name is of the river we’ve just passed.
I read Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss twice. The first time I read it, I didn’t know who any of the characters were. I got to the end and truly had no idea what had happened, though I didn’t care, I just loved to read the book: I would read passages, stop to think about poetry, read some more, get absorbed into the details of the house and the land. There is so, so much detail in this book — it made me feel sometimes like it could be poetry, and that I was wasting my time with line breaks. I did often have to stop to write, I felt overcome with the beauty of the language. –And there are also a lot of characters and time shifts — too many for my sorry plotless brain. I confess that even on the second read I finished not quite knowing the relation of everyone to everyone else (this is my fault, not the book’s).
I finished last night at one in the morning and I felt that feeling that the best literature gives: sort-of tearful, full, sad for this crazy world, in love with language and, truly, its near-omnipotence, in love with humans and our potential.
(Here’s a passage.)
The cook sat with a letter in front of him, blue ink waves lapped the paper and every word had vanished, as so often happined in the monsoon season.
He opened the second letter to find the same basic fact reiterated: there was literally an ocean between him and his son. Then, once again, he shifted the burden of hope from this day to the next and got into his bed, hooked onto his pillow — he had recently had the cotton replaced — and he mistook its softness for serenity.
In the spare room, Gyan was wondering what he had done — had he done the right thing or the wrong, what courage had entered his foolish heart and enticed him beyond the boundaries of propriety? It was the bit of rum he had drunk, it was the strange food. It couldn’t be real, but incredibly, it was. He felt frightened but also a little proud. “Ai yai yai ai yai yai,” he said to himself.
All four inhabitants lay awake as outside the rain and wind whooshed and banged, the trees heaved and sighed, and the lightning shamelessly unzipped the sky over Cho Oyu.
