The Inheritance of Loss

I am writing this to keep up the thin, thin pretense that this is a "book review" blog. ahaahahahaha. But anyway, I have been reading a book, a rather meaty one, and now that I'm done with it, here's what it's about. It's a multi-family, mult-city, multi-generational story about immigration, assimilation, ethnic unrest, family relationships, identity, nationality, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

oh, sorry, that was the sound of ME FALLING ASLEEP because despite all the lovely, exquisitely phrased vignettes author Kiran Desai provides us with, and the sweeping things she has to say about love and change and self-interest, I still did not give two teaspoonfuls of Masala about most of the characters... or maybe it's just that there were so many characters I cared about all of them, but not enough? Either way, I felt that every time I was engrossed in a story line, I got jerked back in time or overseas into another person's equally undeveloped story , ad nauseum etc. etc. and so forth.

Now I have a few other things to say about this book: first of all, it won the oh-so-prestigeeous Mann-Booker prize, which is known in Britain as zzzzzzzzzz...

oh, sorry, that was the sound of ME FALLING ASLEEP again because the Brits, in homage to their patron saint 'Ginia Woolf, pick prize-winning books with lots. and. lots. of. words. that. sound. pretty. but. never. end. Tell a frikkin' story already, eh?

Okay. Enough. The book wasn't so bad. I made it through, after all. I just had gotten got so excited because I racistly was thinking of Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose books I loved so much and was disappointed that this didn't give me the cleverness of the one or the emotional honesty of the other. Shame on me.

Over and out.