The famous female editor from The New Yorker magazine was in no doubt about
the quality of Kiran Desai’s new novel. “This is,” she told the apprehensive
author, “the worst book I have ever read in my life. It is perverse,
horrible and awful, and there is no way to rescue it.”
No surprise, then, cynics will cackle, that Desai’s post-colonial tale The
Inheritance of Loss won the £50,000 Man Booker prize last week. No surprise
either that her mother, the distinguished author Anita Desai, shortlisted
three times for the award but never a winner, had disappeared to a Tibetan
refuge with no telephone or television. The mother of all huffs? Wrong on
both counts. Desai’s novel has been greeted with critical acclaim, although
the decision surprised some literary commentators. John Sutherland, chairman
of last year’s Booker panel, noted that the book needed “a good going-over
by a good editor”. However, the judges felt the Indian-born author richly
deserved to become, at 35, the youngest woman to win the prize, even though
she began as a 7-1 outsider.
As for her mother, Desai has been effusive in praise of her influence and
supportive presence during the long gestation of the book, which is
dedicated to her. She seemed quite comfortable with the incommunicado mode
of her mother, who had offered her this advice before departing: “Everyone
around you will be excited and nervous, but in the end you just have to get
on with your next book.”
On present form, Desai reckons she will be ready for retirement when her third
novel comes out. Her first book took four years to write and she laboured
for eight years on the latest.
Emerging as a virtual unknown from her long self-imposed isolation was
painful. The book had become a “monster”, growing out of control. “I wrote
1,500 pages and cut it down to 300,” she told The Sunday Times last week.
“When I finished, it wasn’t greeted with great love, especially in England.
No one wanted it. No one cared.”
Even after Desai sold the book to Hamish Hamilton she was so strapped that she
had to keep working. Living in the New York literary community of Park
Slope, Brooklyn, she recently took teaching jobs at Columbia University and
in Brooklyn. “But I don’t want to do them. I don’t want to teach.” Last week
may have solved that problem.
In person, Desai is youthful and attractive, with an open and thoughtful
manner that lacks pretension. “She’s rather like an overgrown student,” said
one interviewer. She speaks with a melodious Indian accent and admits to a
fondness for rum.
The Inheritance of Loss moves in split settings between the Himalayas and the
basement kitchens of Manhattan. The town of Kalimpong is home to Sai, an
orphaned teenage girl who lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, his
dog Mutt and their poor cook. Meanwhile, in New York the cook’s son leads a
gruelling existence as an illegal immigrant. The book is not a standard
immigrant tale, but presents migration as a universal experience.
Desai excels at haunting, lyrical descriptions that invest bleak landscape
with beauty. Her book begins: “All day, the colours had been those of dusk,
mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains
possessed of ocean shadows and depths.”
For all the plaudits heaped on Desai at Tuesday night’s black-tie
presentation, a feeling persists that the Man Booker lost its fizz this
year. Gone are the days when Martyn Goff, the now retired administrator,
gleefully stoked controversies by lunching journalists and leaking the
judges’ indiscretions, much to their annoyance.
Unlike last year, there were no big beasts in the offing after the judges had
culled such heavyweights as David Mitchell, Peter Carey, Andrew O’Hagan and
Nadine Gordimer to leave only relative unknowns on the shortlist. The one
entertaining splutter of outrage occurred after Hermione Lee, the
chairwoman, remarked that the ousted favourites were “such talented and
exceptional writers that they don’t need us”.
The BBC’s abandonment of last year’s 30-minute coverage of the award, complete
with interviews and studio pundits, also deprived the occasion of some
limelight. Desai thought it was fun, but found the speeches wearing. “All
they want to talk about is money.” She should complain.
Her book had sold only 2,396 copies when it entered the award’s longlist,
rising to 500 copies a week when she was shortlisted. It can now expect the
15-fold sales bounce of a Man Booker winner. Transformed from obscurity to
international fame in an instant, Desai was hailed by some passing American
tourists as she left the awards ceremony. “We saw the announcement on TV —
you were fabulous,” shouted one.
To a large extent, she has her Indian childhood to thank. The book is modelled
on her experiences of staying at an aunt’s Himalayan retreat. Her
grandfather was a judge who studied at Cambridge, just like her leading
fictional character, although the latter was consumed by self-hatred of his
Indianness.
She was born in Delhi, the daughter of a businessman. Her mother, who had a
Bengali father and a German mother, went on to win five literary awards and
write 14 novels, one of which was turned into the Merchant Ivory film In
Custody. When she was 14 her parents separated, and she followed her mother
to Britain, where the latter became a visiting fellow at Girton College,
Cambridge, for a year.
“I went to the local state school, and of course it was easier than the
aggressive education of the Indian school system,” she recalled. “All I ever
did was read — Jane Austen, the Brontës, Huckleberry Finn.” She was shocked
by the differences between India and the rest of the world. “Suddenly I
understood what it meant to come from a poor country.”
Walking England’s streets was scary. “I was surprised by the hostility. I grew
up thinking the English must feel so bad about the colonial years that
they’ll be nice to me when I go there. Instead they shouted, ‘Go home!’ Even
now they do it when I go outside London.”
Mother and daughter moved to America, where Desai went to high school in
Massachusetts and Hollins University in Virginia. On the surface, her
immigrant experience was beguilingly different, but she came to see it as a
sham. “America is a country where immigration is shored up by a huge, heroic
myth. If you buy into that, it’s easier to fit in. You’re told what to say,
what to aspire to. But it involves being a fake version of yourself.”
She enlisted in a “garbagy” writing course at Columbia University, but had
already started a debut novel that became so consuming she took two years
off to complete it. The book was Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, a
satirical story inspired by an article in The Times of India about a hermit
who lived for years in a tree. She began with no plot or story.
“It sort of gathered momentum and drew me along.” After an excerpt was
featured in The New Yorker, it went on to win the Betty Trask award and was
featured in Salman Rushdie’s anthology of 50 years of Indian writing.
Rushdie, whose praise adorns the cover of The Inheritance of Loss, helped to
kick-start a new style of liberated Indian writing with his 1981 masterpiece
Midnight’s Children. Then the astonishing success of Arundhati Roy’s novel
The God of Small Things in 1997 began a publishing feeding frenzy. The
author William Dalrymple has written hilariously of the literary agents and
publishers who descended on India, “signing up a whole tranche of authors,
many of whom received major advances for outlines of novels they had barely
begun”.
Most of the advances were never repaid by sales, and no new galaxy of stars
has emerged from India. There is a market for Indian writers, fuelled, in
part, by Man Booker’s seeming obsession with post-colonial novels, but they
are almost entirely from the diaspora, as is Desai. Although she says she
still feels foreign in America, she is clearly a product of it.
As a penniless writer in Brooklyn, she shared a small apartment with a former
clown, a fashion designer and a waitress. Their noise drove her to
distraction and into the kitchen, where she wrote and nibbled biscuits.
Eight years passed. “I was living in a completely different time frame,
completely isolated. I wouldn’t answer the phone in all those years. I was
scared of it.” Few people called anyway. The publishers had forgotten her
and moved on. But one day last month the phone rang and an instinct made her
pick it up. It was her publisher. Twenty calls followed in quick succession.
The dizzy whirligig of recognition had begun.
“And then suddenly it’s actually useful to have a phone for one day in your
life.”
