Critical Responses to Kiran Desai
Details of Book: Critical Responses to Kiran Desai
Book: Critical Responses to Kiran Desai
Author: Sunita Sinha [Ed.]
ISBN-13:978-81-269-1242-1
Binding: Hardcover
Publishing Date: 2009
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd. New Delhi.
Number of Pages: 282
Price: Rs. 595.00
About the Book
With Kiran Desai the ‘fine tradition’ of Indian Booker Prize Winners continues. Like her mother Anita Desai, Kiran Desai emerges as a gifted writer. From the mother to the daughter we see a literary tradition being built, starting from Anita Desai’s psychological explorations in her fiction to Kiran Desai’s experiment in the making of a comic fable in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and her insightful and often humorous commentary on multiculturism, cross-cultural and cross-class understanding, globalization and immigrant experience in The Inheritance of Loss. From the fablesque magic and satiric comedy in her celebrated debut, exuding ‘poetry and joy in language and life’, Desai’s Man Booker Prize winning novel moves effortlessly to ‘illuminate the pain of exile, describing the encroaching morass of westernization and the lingering effects of colonialism,’ spanning continents, generations, religion and races, with equal felicity and ease.
Though Desai’s novel holds a mirror up to the world today; looking at the cultural collisions, cultural encounters, post colonialism and continuing consumerist imperialism yet what makes her irresistible however, is her immense tenderness for the human condition, her understanding of human relationships - La Condition Humanitie – The Estate of Man, which forms the core of her entire artistic vision. None less than Jorge Luis Borges provides her with the right words, in the epigraph, for expressing these feelings: “My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. They speak of homeland.”
By engaging closely with the work of the iconic 21st century writer, Kiran Desai, Critical Responses to Kiran Desai, explores a wide range of critical approaches on various ‘hot button issues’ like multiculturism, colonialization, representation, diaspora, and globalization which are of much relevance today. Composed substantially of insightful essays, the collection brings together the voices of esteemed scholars as well as that of emergent scholars. One of the first few attempts to offer a sustained and compelling critique of the much acclaimed writer, the book will prove to be valuable to the scholars, students and teachers of English Literature.