Anita Desai

Excellent stories by Anita Desai, with a variety of settings and precise, crystalline prose. Most of them tend to be quiet, slice-of-life stories with sharp portrayals of discomfort and isolation. My favorites were the first and last. In “Royalty”, the life of a comfortable, successful couple – Sarla and Ravi – is upended temporarily by a visit from their charismatic, capricious famous friend Raja. Desai nicely shows all the little annoyances caused by the visit - they have to cancel show more their trip and stay in the sweltering heat; invitation etiquette causes some snubs; Raja is cheerfully selfish. There is a long backstory between Raja and several of the characters, but Desai leaves that to the reader’s imagination.

The final story, “The Rooftop Dwellers”, follows Moyna, a single woman carefully guarding her independence, as she moves to a rooftop apartment after being kicked out of a women’s hostel. All the major events in the story – which is comparatively long – are the stuff of everyday life – moving, job troubles, problems with the landlord, but the writing is wonderful and I was caught up in Moyna’s story.

“Winterscape”, the second story, creates a nice contrast between the life of a modern couple in Canada and the complicated situation with the husband’s mother and aunt – who are both mothers to him, in different ways – back in India.

The title story has some humor, as it is about the antics of a badly behaved dog, Diamond, and his owner who spoils him nonstop, creating problems with his wife and friends. However, this one comes to a bad end.

“Underground” is deftly written, although the two halves feel a little disjointed. A couple is desperately looking for a hotel, but everyone tells them that the White House, which appears to have vacancies, isn’t an option. The owner of the hotel refuses to let them in – he unhappily recalls his past and marriage.

“The Man Who Saw Himself Drown” is a little surreal, but feels a bit distant as well. The narrator, well, sees himself drown and is taken for dead.

Desai skillfully evokes Polly’s dreamy adolescent interest in art in “The Artist’s Life”. Polly is still on a high coming back from summer camp with a fascinating art instructor, but the odd tenant living behind the house also takes up some of her interest.

“Five Hours to Simla or Faisla” is a somewhat comical, absurdist story where an angry truck driver randomly decides to hold up traffic. Everyone is overheating, angry, and attempting to get him to move.

“Tepoztlan Tomorrow” was the weakest I thought – the writing was still vivid, but the story was mainly Louis returning to his hometown and seeing his relatives rigidly clinging to their old ways and his old friends passionately protesting the development of the town, while he is stuck and passive. show less

Desai's structure and narration are deep, deep things that can hold like a mother, or startle like an earthquake. Though the action is simple, the implications, and the story, are so wide and varied that one must think for oneself to get anything from the text.

I loved this book until the end. The final section of the book is almost-- but not quite-- a story separate from the majority of the novel. At first I found the section to be too critical of Americans. And I still think the section was show more heavy-handed, but I'm starting to wonder if that wasn't the point.

The main text of the novel is committed to the perpetual misunderstandings. There is much to be said about the misunderstandings perpetuated by colonialism, but there is much to be said about those perpetuated by adherence to tradition. The final section is about how all of our good intentions can go so far awry if we don't have something to hold on to. show less

Fasting, feasting is another novel that builds on Philip Larkin's famous line about parents, looking at two seriously dysfunctional families. Uma's middle-class, provincial, Indian MamaPapa (she finds it hard to think of them as separate entities) don't see any particular need for her to have a life of her own. Several attempts to marry her off have failed ignominiously, as have some half-hearted attempts at rebellion, and since she's not clever enough or pretty enough to get away with show more fighting her parents long-term, she finds herself stuck in a life of looking after her baby brother and running pointless errands. Her pretty cousin doesn't fare much better, either - she is married off only to find herself at the mercy of a bullying mother-in-law.

Lest we think that all this is just a rant against "traditional" attitudes to women in India, Desai then changes the scene to Massachusetts, where Uma's overprivileged little brother has been sent for the obligatory "studying overseas". It becomes clear immediately that he's been just as heavily damaged by being pushed to succeed as Uma has by being pushed to fail, and moreover he finds himself staying with an American family that is every bit as dysfunctional as his own, with none of its members (least of all the father, who blithely keeps on barbecuing meat for vegetarians...) paying any serious attention to what's going wrong in the lives of the others. The only real difference between the Indians and the Americans seems to be that the American parents get a chance to mitigate some of the harm they've done before it's absolutely too late... show less

Incandescent, immaculate - this is a pristine little book containing clarity of vision and purpose in such a simple clean package, much like a shard of quartz or the glittering beetle - objects that Desai also pays homage to in the final of the three novellas contained wherein.

I've noticed that writers who are further along in their careers seem to favor a stripped down sort of language, as if the challenge is to convey the same meaning of a 15-worded sentence within a more compact statement show more of perhaps half the length. Desai seemed to do this even early in her career, and it's always done her writing credit; she packs so much dynamite into the shortest of sentences; they are all the more powerful for their brevity.

Within the three novellas are characters who are all desperate for something which they cannot grasp, though the recluse Ravi seems to come closest in the last novella which the whole book takes its title from. The first story's narrator describes his predicament of being presented with a responsibility that he does not quite fathom; the second character conversely grasps at some responsibility in a desperate move to salvage her own self; and the third does not so much take on a responsibility as become it - his duty and his self wholly merged within each other.

It all raises questions that will pick at you long after reading, chiefly regarding the artist's participation in the surrounding world, and whether the degree of engagement is help or hindrance to the creative work. Must you detach yourself completely in order to gain the perspective to translate the world faithfully in your art? And if you do, what about the resulting loss of experience?

What - or where - is the balance? show less