Kiran Desai Shortlisted for Booker Prize
Indian writer Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The shortlist rocked the expectations of those in the publishing world who follow the prize, as the longlisted author favoured to win, David Mitchell, was eliminated, along with other likely contenders Peter Carey, Andrew O’Hagan, Nadine Gormider and Barry Unsworth. Most of the writers remaining on the shortlist, including Desai, are less well-known, often because they are relatively new to the literary world.
The Booker Prize is open to authors from Britain, Ireland, and current or former members of the Commonwealth. The winner of the prize will be announced on 10 October, and will be awarded £50,000. The other contenders for the prize now on the short list are Kate Grenville, for The Secret River, M.J. Hyland for Carry Me Down, Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men, Edward St. Aubyn for Mother’s Milk and Sarah Waters for The Night Watch. Of these, only Waters has been previously shortlisted.
But perhaps Desai is not quite the mystery she seems; though this is only the promising novelist’s second book, her mother, Anita Desai, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, in 1980, 1984 and 1999. The Inheritance of Loss takes place in the northeast of India, near Nepal, at the brink of the movement for Nepalese independence in the mid-1980s, and alternates with another story in New York. Orphaned Sai Mistry is sent to live in Kalimpong with her grandfather, an embittered judge who has little interest in or affection for the girl. His disintegrating mansion houses this ramshackle family, rounded out by the talkative cook, Nandu. The New York segments of the story follow Nandu’s son, Biju, who struggles to find work as an illegal immigrant.
Desai’s novel, then, though not autobiographical, is a product of her cross-continental life. She was born in India in 1971, and was educated in India, England, and most recently Columbia University in New York. She currently lives and travels between the three countries, but feels “no alienation or dislocation” and her novel is evidence that this international experience is one of enrichment.
After all, Salman Rushdie has said of Desai’s newest novel that it “fufills the promise of the first,” and a press as international as Desai herself has given her universal praise. The Guardian calls it “a novel that manages to be both warm-hearted about human nature and clear-sighted about humanity’s flaws,” while the New Yorker summed it up: “Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.”