Book Review: The Inheritance of Loss

82-pages and I cannot take it anymore. 2006 Booker prize winner The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai was the inheritance of misery to say the least.

The writing is painfully poetic. The sentences are badly constructed and 5-lines long. They are full of big words, and so witless - not to mention pointless - that you loose focus and then wonder what she is going on about. She has tried too hard to be funny by using Hinglish frequently which hasn't worked at all; and everything is irrelevantly over-described, be it Pond's Cold Cream, mist over a mountain or the illegal yellow paint on the taxi of an Indian taxi driver in New York. Goodness gracious me.

The characters are the most boring characters I can remember. 50-pages into the book and even if one of the characters physically jumped out of the book and put a feather under my nose, I wouldn't react.

The Grandfather Indian judge in the book is a pretentious miserable old prat. His Grandaughter Sai is this innocent rabbit of a girl with no personality. The cook who is the servant of the house - poor guy hasn't even been given a name until now. Biju, the cook's son who has gone to NY to live the American dream is tolerable, but just about.

The stories of these characters that run in parallel so far have no coherence and do not link in any intelligent way. Unimaginative and annoying characters (with even more annoying names) like Uncle Potty (translate:Uncle Shit), and Major Aloo (Major Potato) and Father Booty (!?) keep coming in and out randomly with no purpose.

Man!

I had promised myself that I would finish the book before I rape it's review, but reading further just seems like a waste of time. To my utter disappointment, most other reviews on Amazon have limitless praise for this book - except this one from a dude who also thought it was awful but atleast finished it.

How on earth did she get a Booker?