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Jul. 31st, 2008 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranKiran Desai took seven years to write The Inheritance of Loss (and four years to write her first novel before that). The original draft ran to over over 1500 pages before being distilled down to just over 300.
It shows. There's a startling level of richness in the prose that means even seemingly minor sentences can be echoing around in your head days afterwards. Little offhand observations resonate with the truth, and sometimes the juxtapositions are so clever it's only from a distance that you can really appreciate them.
I'm not sure what Kiran Desai was doing all those seven years - whether she was writing full-time, or holding down other jobs, but the book certainly feels like seven years' work. What must it be like to finish eleven years of writing and find yourself with two novels (one a Booker Prize winner)? How many books would you manage in a career? Four? Five at the most? What must it have felt like to be in the sixth year, and presumably tearing down your manuscript to just a fifth its size?
After reading the end result though, I'm glad she had the courage to press on and the courage to cut it down.
It shows. There's a startling level of richness in the prose that means even seemingly minor sentences can be echoing around in your head days afterwards. Little offhand observations resonate with the truth, and sometimes the juxtapositions are so clever it's only from a distance that you can really appreciate them.
I'm not sure what Kiran Desai was doing all those seven years - whether she was writing full-time, or holding down other jobs, but the book certainly feels like seven years' work. What must it be like to finish eleven years of writing and find yourself with two novels (one a Booker Prize winner)? How many books would you manage in a career? Four? Five at the most? What must it have felt like to be in the sixth year, and presumably tearing down your manuscript to just a fifth its size?
After reading the end result though, I'm glad she had the courage to press on and the courage to cut it down.
