Inheritance - Hardcover

Ganesan, Indira

3.5

113 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436203944 ISBN 13: 9780436203947

Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1997

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On the surface, fifteen-year-old Sonil has come to her adored grandmother's house on a small island off the coast of India to mend her shaky health. Secretly, however, she longs to find out why her mysteriously distant mother agreed to have her sent away as a child. She spends her time studying Italian with her absentminded uncle and talking about boys and clothes with her favorite cousin until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's rejection--a passionate affair with a young American. But the affair will have a surprising outcome, forcing Sonil to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

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Review:

Remember all those hippies who ran off to India in the 1970s in search of enlightenment? One of the little delights of Indira Ganesan's Inheritance is getting an Indian view of how those truth-seekers fitted into the culture and affected the people around them. A kind of mild feminism guides this unassuming novel of adolescence and self- discovery, set on an island off the Indian coast. The story meanders with its 15-year-old narrator, Sonil, whose chronic poor health has landed her a prolonged break from school at the home of her grandmother. There, time drifts, and events unfold in the flat, unquestioned perspective of youth. Sonil is fatherless, and men appear only fleetingly as silhouettes, sharply outlined but unfathomable. Her relationships with the three generations of women in the household--especially her hostility toward her aloof, eccentric mother--define the girl. But she encounters a young American man, in India to study Ayurvedic medicine, and, for a while, the chaos of Sonil's sensuality focuses on Richard, a passionate but emotionally immature hippie twice her age.

Through her short-lived relationship with him (lots of lovemaking to the music of Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Talking Heads), the wavering line of Sonil's life begins to trace a circle, leading her back to her mother and her unknown father, an American who disappeared from India before she was born. Her inheritance, it seems, is a mandala, full of repeating patterns, which, as the book ends, Sonil is beginning to draw deliberately. Ganesan's prose style has a frank simplicity that is pleasing but evanescent.

Review:

"Inheritance possesses . . . delicate grace, as well as a wisdom that is both childlike and wry." --Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, San Francisco Chronicle "Moving. . . . Ganesan has created an appealing young heroine whose determination and sensitivity wins us over." --The New York Times Book Review "A good book can take us to an exotic locale, flood us with emotions or remind us of that special summer that awakened adulthood. A very good book can do all of these vividly, realistically, seamlessly. Indira Ganesan's Inheritance is such a book." --The Columbus Dispatch "Graceful, economical, and charming." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "[Ganesan] writes a young girl's heart and mind with a true and gentle hand." --Kansas City Star

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