briefly noted

More of this holiday reading, viewing business...

The other day, I finished Kiran's Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.  I read this book as a local book club choice for December, and it's taken me till now to finish it.  Which is no reflection on the book itself, more on my end-of-year lifestyle.

I feel that just about anything I say about this book will sound as tho I'm damning it with faint praise, and indeed, it deserves more than a brief noting. (Desai did win the Booker Prize; surely she has to be happy with that -- Ed.)  Set in the foothills of the Himalayas and the shadow of the Nepalese insurgency, The Inheritance of Loss tells the story of two Indian families facing turmoil and decay. Neglected orphan Sai goes to live with her grandfather, a retired judge, and develops a doomed romance with Gyan, her Maths tutor, who's from the wrong side of the political tracks.  Interwoven with this narrative is that of Biju, the son of her grandfather's cook and now an illegal immigrant in New York.  Both narratives move slowly and subtly towards a climax of brutal pathos (involving a dog).

What I liked particularly about this book, as one interested in combining the personal and the political, was how Desai was able to segue so deftly between the interior narratives of the families to the extenuating social and political circumstances.  Her handling of this material has a rather filmic quality, as tho she's moving from long shots to close-ups.  I was all admiration, as I find many socio-political novel rather too didactic and heavy-handed.  (I think Shaw, with all the political grandstanding that goes on in his plays, has much to answer for in the tradition of political literature.  Some of this stuff would be better off in a blog or an essay than a novel.)

I was less impressed with the film of Elliott Perlman's Three Dollars, which I watched on DVD last night, having missed the cinema release out here in the sticks.  Not having read the book, I don't know how much the film reflects its content -- tho on second thoughts, that might be the film's problem, that it's overly wedded to a prose narrative.

I started watching this DVD at 9 pm and by 10 pm, I was clock-watching, waiting till when the bloody thing would finally be over.  Three Dollars is also about a dysfunctional family in the shadow of globalisation, in this case a pair of thirty-something professionals and their child, who find themselves with unrenewed contracts, a mortgage, a car without petrol, credit card bills, hospital bills, etc, the victims of restructuring, evil corporatisation, etc. 

<David Wenham, wondering if he really should have auditioned for Waiting for Godot instead, after meeting with madman with dog in park>

This is going to sound terribly harsh, but I felt like saying: oh for godsake, just do something clever with your credit cards for a while or sell some assets.  You'll both get jobs again, you're young urban professionals, you've got parents and degrees.  (We've all been there, haven't we?)  While professional people with families do end up on the streets due to interest rate rises etc (like one of the more plausible minor characters in the film), I wasn't quite convinced that this nice young couple were quite on the edge -- yet. In an excrucriating, scarcely plausible and try-hard Beckettian segment of the film, Eddie, the main character, starts consorting with down-and-outs on the streets, learning how to beg, on the very first afternoon after he's been sacked.  After he's had his lights knocked out protecting fellow, Waiting for Godot-style tramps, Eddie ends up back at home in the bosom of his good-looking family (no doubt musing, of course, about the abyss that's about to open before him).

To make matters worse, the film is interlaced with reminiscences (along with a heavy-handed narrative motif concerning three dollars) about a blonde, Hitchcockian phallic woman by the name of Amanda (Amandas are always trouble, if you ask me) with whom the hero is absolutely nashed on.  This was exactly the kind of woman to bore and rile me -- a male fantasy figure with no problems in her life except for managing to sleep with too many people at the one time. 'Amanda' obviously yearns to be a symbol of a bright, brash, class-adaptative future, the resilient face of the new corporatism etc but I found her utterly tiresome (perhaps appropriately so).

The other problem for me with this film was -- David Wenham.  I'm not a big fan of Wenham (sorry, blonds and sloping shoulders don't do it for me) but generally, I find him a commendable actor.  Here I found his laconic, deadpan delivery of his character's rather acidic lines totally misplaced -- they needed someone with a bit more bite for this part, a protagonist who was already rather flat and reactive (partly because he lives so much 'in his head' through first person narrative voice-overs).  Otherwise, Frances O'Connor gives a sterling woman-on-the-edge type performance as his wife -- in the way of Australian actresses -- and the child actor deals impressively with a difficult range of emotions and events.

Overall, I felt that while the film dealt with powerful themes, it chose the wrong subjects for its focus.  I dunno if this story was any better on the big screen or in the book, but I wouldn't rush to borrow it on DVD again.

Comments

[susoz]

I just finished the Desai book too. It's strange, but compelling, I think. It felt like it was written by a young person but she's 35.

[Kate]

The book of 'Three Dollars' is okay. It draws out a lot more of the 'why' than the film does, ie, the wife has clinical depression that goes on for some time and financially imperils the family, the incident with the man and the dog is a little more probable in the book. But it didn't hugely grab me, and I felt the movie was pretty under-done as well. Just a bit average in that way Australian movies can often be.

[elsewhere]

Yes, the voice in Desai's book is young, I think possibly because it's most influenced by Sai's voice, if that makes sense.

[Ariel]

I was a big fan of the Desai, too, and I agree with you that she pulls off the socio-political novel very deftly - the characters don't feel like tools of a political statement, they exist in their own right, and the story is utterly believable.

I saw 'Three Dollars' when it was released and quite liked it, though it is deeply flawed and doesn't handle the personal-political thing so well. It's a bit heavy-handed, and the homeless-after-one-day thing is ridiculous. But I had read the book, which I guess helps, and the little girl's performance made me cry (I cry easily at children in peril). And I'm a fan of both Wenham and O'Connor (who does a great line in likable, quirky depressives). Amanda - pah! Tiresome indeed.

[A. N. Nanda]

Hi,

I also read Kiran Desai's "Inheritance of Loss" a month back. It was an interesting reading experience. There is one thing about character selection that every writer should always keep in mind: characters are to be chosen to do justice to the theme chosen and to the settings carved out. Here in her book, small characters like a cook or an illegal migrant, or a haggard old-timer or a numskull rustic have allowed themselves to be explored fully and decisively.

I've also attempted one review of this book in my blog http://ramblingnanda.blogspot.com . You may have a look.

Thanks

Nanda
http://remixoforchid.blogspot.com
http://ramblingnanda.blogspot.com