There must be some families somewhere that peacefully transfer real estate, but they don’t get much press. At least since Jacob and Esau, stories about property have been a stew of strife. If you don’t believe me, talk to the lawyers for King Lear’s daughters – a bleak house among many.
“The Magnificent Ruins,” by Nayantara Roy. Algonquin. 436 pages.
$29 Algonquin Nayantara Roy uses this age-old conflict as the spark for her engrossing debut novel, “The Magnificent Ruins.” The narrator is Lila De, a smart young book editor at a New York publishing company that’s just been bought by a billionaire. For Lila, the acquisition means a huge promotion, but just as her publishing house is being radically upgraded, a house of a different sort disrupts her life.
In the summer of 2015, Lila receives news that she’s inherited her grandfather’s palatial old residence – a grand five-story building with carved pillars and Roman windows. This is hardly an unencumbered windfall, though. The house is 8,000 miles away in India – location, location, location! And what’s even more complicated: The house is inhabited by three generations of Lila’s family.
Professionally, the timing couldn’t be worse, but Lila secures permission for an eight-week leave of absence and flies off to Kolkata to figure out what she should do with her ancestral home. It’s no accident that we use the word “story” to describe the levels of a house and the plot of a book. Roy’s roomy .
