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by Suzanne Buchert
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai & The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The 2006 Man Booker Prize winning novel “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai begins “All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the winds at its summit.” “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, begins “The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins.” Both of these books beckoned to me from the previously described “buy 2, get 3rd free” tables at Borders Book Store. Borders, that seducer of readers, adds to its perfidy by offering a receipt coupon of a 30% off on a purchase made within one week on any book costing more than $10. They are really beyond the pale with these schemes! Add to that, the attention grabbing announcements on the covers of these particular books “Winner of the….” and I was lost, overcoming my usual scorn of the “National Bestseller” emblazoned on the top of the front covers. Bestseller can often be translated into “read today, into the dustbin tomorrow”, but “Winner of” gives a book a bit more credibility. After all, the excruciating “Bridges of Madison County” was a best seller for months and that was nothing more than a Harlequin Romance in a serious-book cover. But Faulkner’s Pulitzer winning books are still being read, at least by English majors and Oprah devotees. In preparing to write these reviews, I opened each book, looking for the first lines. In both books there were pages and pages of blurbs about what wonderful, unique, exceptional works of literature these books are. Words like “fascinating, flawless, and grand” are thrown around by reviewers. You would think it was Tolstoy or something. These guys should get a grip; the superlatives they use way too frequently only make the prospective reader skeptical. How many “fascinating, flawless and grand” books can there be in a year! Enough carping. Here goes. “The Inheritance of Loss” tells of an orphaned girl sent to live with her grandfather, a retired judge. They live in a beautiful landscape at the foot of a magnificent mountain. However, most of the people who inhabit the book are broken, trodden on by the political situation and the poverty of the country and of the countryside where they live. They are expendable. Their lives can and do end abruptly for no reason or through some obscure misunderstanding. It seems that these types of books are in vogue. There have been several others that I have run across, started, and just gave up on because they were so unremittingly sad. It is well written and the characters are interesting, and if you haven’t had your fill of books with unhappy beginnings, middles, and endings, go ahead and read it. “The Known World” is the story of a former slave, a freed black man, who owned slaves himself. I was totally unprepared for such a concept. Talk about things your history books don’t teach you! The main character was allowed to work at a skill he developed while a slave and he was also given some of the money he earned. Saving that money allowed him to buy his freedom and eventually that of his wife and then his child. The child, who had been a favorite of his former owner through the years before his parents were able to save the money needed to purchase him, grew up and became a land owner himself. He found that in order to work that land, he needed slaves. He surely thought himself a benevolent slave owner, but to his slaves he was no different from other slave owners and they sought their freedom as ardently as his family had when they were slaves. Just as in the previous book, people were expendable. They were maimed and killed as punishment or even on a whim. The only consideration taken into account for their death was the loss to their owner of their value as a worker. They had no value as human beings. Although this book was also incredibly sad, for some reason, I found it much more to my taste than the previous books. It is difficult to say that I enjoyed reading a book with this subject, but it was a good book, and I recommend it. The characters were memorable, the paradox puzzling, the story, to me at least, an unknown aspect of the subject of slavery in our country. Until next month, keep reading, even if it is just light summer laying in the hammock and sipping an ice tea kind of reading.
Suzanne Buchert and her husband, Keith, own several restaurants.
sbuchert@hotmail.com
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