| Popis: |
Critics have pointed to the importance of ‘contemporary’ issues in Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Commenting on the issues of ‘globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence’, Pankaj Mishra, for example, has read The Inheritance of Loss as an ‘exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair’ that may ‘strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view’. While not refuting the validity of such views, this paper will offer a different perspective. Taking its cue from a line at the end of The Inheritance of Loss, where one of the main characters has gained the insight that she can no longer ‘think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself’, this paper will suggest that The Inheritance of Loss can be read as a hyperfabula that is local and universal as well as optimistic and pessimistic in equal measure. The worlds created by Desai are surveyed from an immanent-transcendent narrative position that embraces the smallest creature as lovingly as the widest landscapes while pointing to the possibility of serenity and survival in the midst of cruel and tragic events. Desai’s descriptions in their very profuseness could be seen as the main plot, in which an equalizing narrative movement balances gains and losses in animal and human worlds while placing the centripetal attractions of home and the centrifugal flights of diaspora in elaborate relief. |
