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| Guardian book club: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Told with palpable anger and scant sympathy for its characters, this is a powerful novel but I confess that I struggled to really appreciate itWhen Kiran Desai's Inheritance Of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize, a few eyebrows were raised. Although she had a famous mother (Anita Desai) who had herself been on the Booker shortlist three times, Kiran was relatively unknown. Comparatively few had read her book, and the bookies had her down at fifth or sixth favourite. So far so normal – Hilary Mantel's victory this year is the first time I can remember a favourite winning. What was unusual that following on from its success the book was subject to protests and book-burning.Sadly, it wasn't fans of fellow shortlisted author Edward St Aubyn's Mothers' Milk stoking the bonfires, but the outraged residents of Kalimpong. The novel tells of a 1980s rebellion of the ethnic Nepalese in the Himalayan town, who were fed up (in Desai's words) of being "treated like the minority in the place where they were the majority". As the book details, the rebellion was bloody and chaotic. Its fictional portrayal must have hit a raw nerve, especially since Desai herself was, as one man put it at the time, "an outsider" who made the "whole town … strange." She particularly seems to have offended those of Nepalese descent who thought themselves described as little better than thieves and menial fools.There's perhaps a small grain of truth to these claims. Desai certainly doesn't glorify Kalimpong's non-Indian majority. But the irony is that they get off lightly compared to everyone else. As she teases out her multiple narrative we meet over-privileged Indians who put on absurd English airs; racist, ignorant and distinctly under-intelligent English people; Indians in America who use Gandhi's image to make money while exploiting other Indians; and Indians in America who allow themselves to be exploited. Also, there are the Americans themselves, whose capitalist empire is perhaps the cruellest thing in the book. Nearly every character she focuses on is at some stage degraded and humiliated. Nearly every character also degrades and humiliates others. The "loss" of the title is physical, spiritual, and inescapable.It is in short a singularly acerbic novel. One that does not win friends by flattery. Even so, it's possible to see why the 2006 judges were won over. Desai's anger, for a start, is a force to be reckoned with. The cold, controlled rage with which she describes – say – an Indian in England watching a countryman take a beating and turn and flee, makes for occasionally heart-stopping reading. The indignation that builds over the course of the book, meanwhile, is overwhelming. But there are also gentler pleasures. As much as anything this is a descriptive tour de force. There are fine evocations of the clean beauty of the Himalayas, the all-pervading dank of the monsoon, huge crumbling colonial mansions, crammed basements where bed shortages force immigrant labourers to sleep in shifts. Her prose is strong and vivid and generally a delight to read.I say generally because occasionally Desai steps over the boundary between enjoyably rich and horribly cloying. Take the following, for instance: "a simple blind sea creature, but refusing to be refused … odd: insistent, but cowardly; pleading but pompous." That is how Desai renders a male "organ". There's also a whiff of sixth-form straining for profundity. A man who is blinded disappears "entirely inside the alcohol that has always given him solace". And when a light blows it diminishes "to a filament, tender as Edison's first miracle held between delicate pincers of wire in the glass globe of the bulb".I also failed to engage with the book's main narratives. The politics and history are fascinating, but I felt dragged along the path Desai weaves through them. I had little sense of urgency or involvement. The central strand relating to the failed love between a privileged Indian girl and her Gorkha tutor, though refreshingly bitter rather than sweet, I found particularly flat. The female half of the equation (Sai) is the one character that Desai allows to escape with any dignity and the only one for whom she pushes any claim for respect and sympathy (rather than pity). Yet she too remained for me unreal, unformed, mildly annoying and largely uninteresting. I didn't care for her travails or anything else. So it was a book I admired rather than liked.Yet I'm more aware than ever that these are subjective judgements. My basic objection is little more than that the book isn't to my personal taste. But is it to yours? And what else am I missing that the Booker judges saw. All comments will be even more gratefully received than usual, since they'll help inform John Mullan's final column of the month on readers' responses to the book.FictionBooker prizeSam Jordisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Double Agency In this novel, British and American spies clash in the buildup to the Beijing Olympics. feeds.nytimes.com |
A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve | Book review Kate Kellaway probes the secret of Anita Shreve's appealAnita Shreve has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, earning her place in "popular" fiction. But she seems unable to transcend this category and is often snootily reviewed. Perhaps it is that critics tend to underrate the narrative gift (even though it is all too rare). Or is it that she is almost literary – but not quite?Most of Shreve's work is set in her native America, but in her latest novel – her 15th – she steps into the darkness, and light, of Africa. Set in Kenya, the novel is more than a cliffhanger: you could call it a glacier-dropper.American newlyweds Patrick (a doctor) and Margaret (a photographer) are expats temporarily based in Nairobi, where Patrick is studying tropical diseases. They are befriended by their hosts, Arthur and Diana, an unpleasantly complacent white colonial couple. It's 1977 and Jomo Kenyatta is still in power, but this is mere background to the human story. The two couples (along with a slightly random third pair) decide during a drunken dinner to climb Mount Kenya together. Halfway across the glacier – the ascent is described in nightmarish detail – one of the party is killed. Who is to blame? It is a tragedy that will, metaphorically, put Margaret and Patrick's marriage on ice.Reading A Change in Altitude, what struck me is that its author's narrative gift is so highly developed that it gets the upper hand. It is like a wind against which her characters have little resistance: they are blown at speed by it (or, in this case, a High Wind in Kenya) until their story is done. As a result, the novel is short on psychological insight. Self-knowledge is not, after all, quickly achieved.By contrast, she is over-thorough in describing clothes (the outdoor fleeces for the climbing trip are "bluish gray jackets with hoods" which they had bought "on sale in Boston before leaving") and on food (a picnic menu is exhaustive). You could say this makes the story more accessible. But the trouble is that there is at once too much information and not enough. Reading Shreve is like shopping, although far more eventful. It offers an almost consumerist satisfaction, like rifling through a catalogue or a travel brochure with snapshots of Africa in it. She writes well but needs a far more exacting editor. Every now and then, a stinker of a sentence slips through: "Patrick and Margaret sat in the sofa's plush center, fending off witty barbs and occasionally gazing at the stars." Less of the squashy sofa and more of the intricacies of the human heart would have made this a better novel.And yet, for all its faults, I enjoyed A Change of Altitude and found its moral sensibility attractive. Shreve asks readers to think about whether you can separate "actions" from "unintended consequences". And one of the consequences of the glacier accident is that Margaret falls in love with Rafiq, a British-educated reporter. It is a romance that goes nowhere at speed – like all the relationships in the novel. For the most peculiar aspect of this book is that it is full of incomplete stories. I was sure, to give just one example, that it would reveal the enigmatic Patrick to us. But it didn't. Perhaps the superhumanly productive Anita Shreve could be persuaded to write a sequel and put this right.Kate Kellawayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Loren Singer, ‘Parallax View’ Author, Dies at 86 Mr. Singer wrote the thriller, “The Parallax View,” which was one of the first novels to offer a paranoid vision of the United States as a country controlled by ruthless technocrats. feeds.nytimes.com |
Books of The Times: A Rebel in Cyberspace, Fighting Collectivism An impassioned argument about the downside of online collectivism and Web 2.0 culture from the Silicon Valley veteran Jaron Lanier. feeds.nytimes.com |