The Inheritance is a novel about a man who is seeking to realise his inheritance. There’s not much in the way of subtext. Daniel has an uncle who lives in Venezuela. Daniel is his only kin. He has left a will, but the will is less definitive than it should be and Daniel accuses the Venezuelan executors of the will of stealing two million dollars which is rightfully his. The struggle to reclaim the monies takes years. Daniel gyrates from London to Caracas to Panama to Miami. It also leads to the breakdown of his marriage. However, there is another factor in the breakdown of the marriage: Daniel has an affair with a neighbour which his wife finds out about. The fact that he has no income; he is a listless poet; that his family live from hand to mouth and that he’s having an affair are never really acknowledged by the narrator as the real reason for his problems: rather he blames it all on his failure to realise an inheritance, which he doesn’t really seem to deserve on any kind of higher moral grounds. If this was a novel about misplaced obsession and fatal flaws, it might have been powerful; however the author seems, for reasons that aren’t always easy to discern, devoted to his protagonist, for whom it’s impossible to feel any kind of sympathy as his case goes from bad to worse.
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