The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, is a fantastic book, about living as a foreigner and what it means to be home. The sense of place in this book is so vivid that it was strange to stop reading it and realize I wasn't in Nepal or New York City. The writing is beautiful, with a style bordering on magic realism; the characters are poignant and believable. I loved this book and recommend it highly.

Some excerpts:

"Looking at a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept in sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn't afford them anymore."

"'Good night. Good-bye. So long' - not Indian sentences, English sentences. Perhaps that's why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place: the self-consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact."

This passage describes a phone call between Biju in New York City and his father in Nepal. "The atmosphere of Kalimpong reached Biju all the way in New York; it smelled densely on the line and he could feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gestures of ferns; he could hear the croak trrrr whonk, wee wee butt ock butt ock of frogs in the spinach, the rising note welding imperceptibly with the evening....Suddenly, after this there was nothing more to say, for while the emotion was there, the conversation was not; one had bloomed, not the other, and they fell abruptly into emptiness."