Author Kiran Desai, winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. (Katja Lenz/AFP/Getty Images)
For a recipient of the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, Kiran Desai is surprisingly humble. “I don’t think it’s a perfect book,” she says of her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. “There are bits that seem too slow or too fast. And in some places, I don’t think it works at all.” (Of her first book, 1998’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, she has been almost dismissive, once telling a journalist she felt it was “frivolous.”) And at the Booker ceremony on Oct. 10, she thanked her fellow nominees — among them the bookies’ favourite, Sarah Waters (The Night Watch), and former Orange Prize winner Kate Grenville (The Secret River) — by saying that “I know the best book does not win. The compromise wins.”
All this modesty might make Desai sound rather stuffy and serious, but in person she’s more self-deprecatingly funny than prim. “In India, the Booker is really followed by the media,” she says. “After I won, the press called my family there for their reaction. All my old aunties ran at high speed to the phone, so happy to say embarrassing things about me, like ‘Kiran was never a bright student, but she once cooked me a very nice meal.’”
At 35, she is the youngest woman to win the prize and is still in shock to have garnered an award that has eluded her novelist mother, the three-time Booker nominee Anita Desai. (Don’t worry about any familial disharmony: The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated “to my mother with so much love,” and the elder Desai has said that “having Kiran on the shortlist and winning has been far more intense” than being nominated herself.) Born in India, Desai left Delhi when she was 16 to live with her mother in the United States, where she earned a master’s degree in writing at Columbia University.
After her acclaimed debut with Hullabaloo, she spent seven years working on The Inheritance of Loss, living off her advance and writing and rewriting a 1,500-page manuscript that was eventually pared down to a crisply paced and riveting 324 pages. The novel, set mainly in the 1980s, crosses the globe to tell two parallel stories about clashes of class, race and nationality. The first is that of a reclusive, Cambridge-educated judge who lives a Spartan and lonely retirement at the foot of the Himalayas with his orphaned granddaughter and his lower-caste cook. The other is that of the cook’s son, who has immigrated to New York, where he toils alongside an army of fellow, prosperity-seeking illegals in the city’s restaurants.
On the heels of an appearance at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors — and just two weeks after her Booker win — Desai jokes that she’s jetlagged and plagued by dreams of lost luggage. “I’m naturally quite quiet. Writing the novel was several years of a really, really quiet life. Three-quarters of the time, the attention has been wonderful, but the rest of the time, my personality just doesn’t hold up. I want to be mature and gracious about it, but I get so grumpy, I just want to crawl into bed.”
She spoke to CBC Arts Online about the growing gulf between India’s rich and poor, the struggles of an artist’s life and finally getting around to seeing a doctor.
Q: I understand that your mother initially discouraged you from becoming a writer.
A: It seems so luxurious and romantic, the artist’s life, and I use that romantic fantasy to seduce myself. The romantic image of being a writer helps me get through the difficulties of writing. But my mother knew how hard it was. It’s incredibly solitary, yet you need the world as well. And that balance is incredibly hard to attain — the balance between keeping one foot in the world and not going crazy and one foot in the writing world demands that you become a little crazy, because there’s no way you can go to the those weird, eccentric places and take risks with language unless you are completely unselfconscious. Of course, there’s also the practical stuff, like making money. You don’t have health insurance. And you worry about paying for your rent and groceries.
Kiran Desai poses after the Man Booker Prize awards ceremony on Oct. 10, 2006. (John D. McHugh/AFP/Getty Images)
Q: I guess the Booker win eases those worries a little.
A: Yes, and when I’m feeling grouchy, I remind myself that I can now work for a few years and not think about money. I can go to the doctor. I think I’ve been full of lumps for years, I really have. [Laughs.] It’s the kind of thing that people run to the doctor about, but I just didn’t even allow myself to think that I might have cancer. I haven’t been to the doctor, I can’t afford it. I save up my illnesses for the year and get it taken care of in one shot.
Q: You should move to Canada where there’s socialized medicine.
A: I know. You’re so lucky. Maybe I’ll start going on those bus tours with senior citizens that drive up to Canada and get prescriptions filled. Or I’ll take holidays to Mexico to buy new glasses.
Q: Speaking of travel, you wrote this book over seven years, while you lived in New York, India and Mexico. What did you draw from these different places?
A:Mexico is such a fascinating country and I thought it would bring me luck because [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez writes there. But also, I could extend the arguments of my book. It didn’t have to be just India and the States, but it could be a broader argument in terms of the developing world and the Western world.
With New York and the States, in general, that was where I went to college and I could never have done half of what I’ve done without that kind of educational system. All the big opportunities with my work have come from the States. As for life in New York, the mix of people is just heaven to me: the whole world lives in one city.
Yet living in New York, living the life of a Westernized woman is hard. It comes with so much privilege, but it’s so hard. You have to get up in the morning and propel yourself forward in a society that expects you to be an individual, and make your own career and destiny, and always be positive. You have to keep each day going and the day you let it fall, you fall.
I really do miss that enormous community of India, where you don’t feel that incredible degree of loneliness and isolation. No matter what kind of person you are, you are caught in a web of family and the momentum of all those lives being lived around you just automatically moves you along. There’s a certain amount of peace and comfort in that. You don’t have to worry in the same way about your life going dead if you don’t perform.(Penguin Books Canada)
Q: The main theme in this book is the aftermath of colonization and the failure of globalization to bridge the persistent gap between the wealthy and the poor around the world. What drew you to this issue?
A: I’ve been interested in and conscious of the way that a particular class of Indian — the class that I come from — betrays other Indians. I’m talking about the middle and upper class, the type of Indian that is held up as a model of success, who travels to London, New York and Hong Kong and is getting very, very rich. Meanwhile, there are 300 million Indians who live below the poverty line, with literally no water or electricity. I think that India is really going to falter unless we bridge that divide.
Q: Do you find yourself getting drawn into political debates because of the novel’s rather bleak take on multiculturalism and globalization?
A: Yes! And one of the worst parts about talking to the press is that people expect me to have something to say that’s comforting and give a solution. I don’t feel honest trying to come up with something. It’s a strange position. Luckily, as a writer I can complicate the issue in all kinds of dimensions, and I had endlessly more angles to examine. I tried to make an argument while staying true to the novel.
Q: In fiction, you can also examine the emotions underneath the political debate. For instance, your Indian characters’ experience in the West is, for the most part, one of humiliation, shame, loneliness and self-loathing.
A: I see that when I go to the embassy to get my visa renewed. I see the incredible desperation and humiliation of [the other people there]. And it’s all just an accident of birth, but this is what it means [to be a poor immigrant in America]: you work very hard and your family back home is pushing for your success, but the U.S. doesn’t want you and it’s becoming harder and harder to get a visa. It’s a push from both sides. And you are always on the wrong end of the power imbalance: struggling to eat the right way and talk the right way and dress the right way. Certainly some people manage while others falter. I wanted to show both sides of that.
Q: In the book, 1950s England and 1980s New York don’t seem that different in how they welcome – or, actually, don’t welcome – immigrants. Was this also intended to be a reflection on the mood in America post 9/11?
A: There suddenly seems to be a huge gulf between the U.S. and the developing world. As an immigrant, it’s hoped that you will just join in and assimilate and leave your past behind. But as an immigrant, you can’t honestly do so. You can try, you can even tell yourself that you are really American, but there’s a lot of cruelty and betrayal of your family and your past in cutting those ties. The post-9/11 world simplified the dialogue in ways that are very dangerous. You know, it’s “You’re either with us or against us.” After 9/11, most immigrants I know went out and bought an American flag. For the first time they were scared about what their place might be in the U.S.
The Inheritance of Loss is published by Penguin Canada and is available in stores.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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