Synopses & Reviews
Praise for Anita Desai and The Zigzag Way
"Long before Jhumpa Lahiri … long before Monica Ali … another novelist was offering us exquisitely detailed portraits of bodies in transit [and] classes in the art of sly and sensuous fiction … Anita Desai was a global, migrant writer before such a thing was fashionable … In The Zigzag Way, she stakes out new ground and so yields discoveries about places not found on any map." – Time
"A hypnotic journey … Reading Anita Desai is in a way like journeying into the heart of a painting. " – San Jose Mercury News
"[Desai] has created a large body of intelligent fiction in which she considers the factors – familial, ethnic, geographic and occupational – that shape the sense of who we are … Desai lived for a while in Mexico. That, and her wonderful way with words, explains the truth and beauty with which she describes the country's folk culture and its desert terrain." – Seattle Times
"Desai's … vivid description of place and an elegantly evoked past make this little journey worth taking." – Boston Magazine
"Desai's tale is a joyful one… illustrat[ing] a contention that each of us is more, much more, than the apparent sums of our different lives." – New Leader
"A narrative that shines with scintillating detail in chiseled prose … it draws the reader in." – South Asian Women's Network, Sawnet.org
"Sensitive proof that understanding lies as much in the details as in the broad strokes." – Kirkus Reviews
"Over more than two decades, Anita Desai has produced a series of books notable for their intelligence, restraint, exotic settings, juxtaposition of unlikely characters, and elegant prose … The Zigzag Way exhibits all these gifts in abundance … sensual, vivid, frightening, and almost unbearably suspenseful." – Boston Globe
In The Zigzag Way, the critically acclaimed novelist Anita Desai offers a gorgeously nuanced story of expatriates and travelers adrift in an unfamiliar land. Eric, a young American historian, has come to Mexico on his first trip abroad. His search for his immigrant family's roots brings him to a town in the Sierrra Madre, where a hundred years earlier Cornish miners toiled without relief. Here the suspiciously enigmatic Doña Vera, the fierce Austrian widow of a mining baron, has become a local legend, but her reputation for philanthropy glosses over a darker history. A haunting, powerful novel that culminates on the Day of the Dead, The Zigzag Way examines the subtle interplay between past and present.
"Written with charm and ferocity. Anita Desai packs worlds into pages, but keeps her eye close to the private, painful, funny humanity of her characters." – Louise Erdrich
"A profound look at life through the prism of travel . . . [Desai] has an extremely rare gift of transitioning seamlessly between characters of different eras and cultures." – Chicago Tribune
"A beautifully rendered combination of history, folklore, and modern fiction." – Entertainment Weekly, Editor's Choice
Anita Desai is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Baumgartner's Bombay, Clear Light of Day, Diamond Dust, and Fasting, Feasting, among other works. Three of her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she now lives in New York.
Synopsis
In The Zigzag Way, the critically acclaimed novelist Anita Desai offers a gorgeously nuanced story of expatriates and travelers adrift in an unfamiliar land. Eric, a young American historian, has come to Mexico on his first trip abroad. His search for his immigrant familys roots brings him to a town in the Sierrra Madre, where a hundred years earlier Cornish miners toiled without relief. Here the suspiciously enigmatic Dona Vera, the fierce Austrian widow of a mining baron, has become a local legend, but her reputation for philanthropy glosses over a darker history. A haunting, powerful novel that culminates on the Day of the Dead, The Zigzag Way examines the subtle interplay between past and present.
Anita Desai is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Baumgartners Bombay, Clear Light of Day, Diamond Dust, and Fasting, Feasting, among other works. Three of her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she now lives in New York.
Synopsis
From the author of Fasting, Feasting comes her visually and emotionally haunting new novel.
Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload, but gradually seduced -- by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a "ghost" mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth.
On the Dia de los Muertos, the feast day when the locals celebrate and remember their dead, the various strands of the novel come together hauntingly, bringing together past and present in a moment of quiet, powerful epiphany.
About the Author
Anita Desai was born in Mussorie, India, in 1937. Among her many published works in a career that spans three decades are CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY and IN CUSTODY, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches writing at MIT. She is married and has four children, including Kiran Desai, author of HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD.