Disappointed
The Inheritance of Loss was so promising! I loved the blurb on the back; I loved the colorful cover; I loved the first 300 pages. And then it ended, without wrapping up any major plot points. I am not a happy-ending girl. I don’t need for every character to be entering into a promising and happy love affair at the book’s end, or for every conflict to be resolved such that the good guys win and the bad guys lose. But plot, as I understand it, consists of a conflict that begins, escalates, and is somehow resolved. This book just stops.
This is unfortunate, because I thought lots of things were really well done here. The story of Sai and Gian falling in love was very beautiful and, I thought, very well-rendered. The old man in the crumbling house with the dog – you know I loved every bit of it. The bits about Bijou making his way in the US, finding himself becoming best friends with a Muslim and having to work out whether he hates all Muslims, or just Pakistanis, or just certain kinds of individuals in either group, or both – you KNOW i loved. I also very much enjoyed the sections describing the mountain and its vegetation – very Old English Novel – (please excuse me for not being able to give you a genre/author name here, but you know the ones…) where each chapter begins with a description of the wind blowing across the heather on the moor and then the author finally zooms in on the character, some lovely girl sitting in the window looking out over the gray and purple heath. Only this was better, because the land being described was a tropical mountain complete with dense clouds and dripping tendrils. Sweet.
But then the book just ended, and I am left wondering what happened to the dog? to the Gorkaland Army (which was never adequately explained in the first place)? to the family that stole the dog? to the old man? to the old sisters? to the cook and his son? Do Sai and Gian get back together? Does the town come under Nepali control?
At the end of the day, this book had great details. The eating scenes, the National Geographics, the Indian restaurant, the cook’s shed, the judge before he was old and mean sitting in a boarding house in London not talking to anyone…. yes. Excellent. Bring it on. This was all great. Details are hard to do well. But in writing all these gorgeous little details it just seems that Kiran forget to take care of some huge plot issues. I love books with big ensemble casts, where there are a whole slew of main characters and their lives are all tangled together in some way that you don’t fully understand until the last 75 pages (On Beauty, The Corrections, Purple America…). But I don’t like reading about 25 people, some of whom (Father Booty, the dog-stealers, the judge’s wife…) are never fully developed, and who are being written about in tandem only because they all hail from the same town.
Disappointed as a was at the end of this book, I did read the whole thing in 2 days because I really liked the beginning and middle – actually I liked it very much until the last page when it became clear that it was just going to stop for no reason. I would gladly have read another several hundred pages, if I had Kiran’s word that my questions were eventually going to be answered.
