Critical Responses To Kiran Desai

Contributed articles on the works of Kiran Desai, b. 1971, Booker Prize 2006 winner.

Anita Desai And Her Novels Have Been An Enigma For Decades. Scholars, Critics, Researchers And Students Have Never Stopped Marvelling About Supremacy Of Idea Over Matter In The Works Of This Gifted Novelist. The Philosophical Mood, The Realization Of A Grand Design, The Presence Of Unsaid, Unarticulated Realities All These Have Forever Teased The Mind Of The Discerning Reader. In The Present Volume, Anita Desai Has Been Extensively And Intensely Probed. As The Reader Will See, The Thrust Has Been More On Psychological And Intellectual Facets Of Her Fiction, Rather Than Social, Cultural Or Physical Areas. This Is The Trend Of Criticism These Days And It Is Rightly So. The Fine Subtleties, The Small But Significant Turn Of Events, The Role Of Place In The Formation Of Mental Scene, The Vitality Of Characters, The Force Of Their Personalities, The Intricate Web Of Relationships All These Have Been Examined And Expressed In Words That Are At Once Easy To Understand As Well As Graceful To Aesthetic Sense.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize: An “extraordinary” novel “lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender” (The New York Times Book Review). In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered old judge wants only to retire in peace. But his life is upended when his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over the girl, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her tutor, the household descends into chaos. The cook witnesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. In a grasping world of colliding interests and conflicting desires, every moment holds out the possibility for hope or betrayal. Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters and “uncannily beautiful” prose (O: The Oprah Magazine). “A book about tradition and modernity, the past and the future—and about the surprising ways both amusing and sorrowful, in which they all connect.” —The Independent

This collection of critical essays on Kiran Desai's 'The Inheritance of Loss' provides in-depth intellectual and critical analysis of the text from a broad scholarly perspective.

Sampath Chawla, a young postal worker who never feels as though he fits into the small Indian town into which he is born, one day climbs up a tree, only to become a famous holy man

Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India: Losing Nature, edited by Zelia Bora and Murali Sivaramakrishnan, contextualizes the two subcontinents of India and Brazil and closely examines environmental issues from within and without. This collection focuses largely on the fate of forests and water in these two geographical terrains. This book explores narratives that reflect transformations: hitherto unprecedented demographic expansions, exploitation of natural resources, pollution and depletion of river and fresh water sources, uncontrollable demands on the energy front, waste and garbage disposal, drastic reduction of biodiversity. All of these are factors to research when one considers “losing nature.” In philosophical as well as theoretical terms the question of what is nature, what is gained and lost in human-nature interaction, what is the essential “balance” of nature, are all important queries on a similar scale. Societal reality in present day Brazil and India is reconstructed and deconstructed at will by the powerful influence of the past alongside that of globalization and technocratic market structures. The volume contemplates the representation and interrogation of environmental issues in both subcontinents, Brazil and India.