Synopses & Reviews
A triptych of beautifully crafted novellas make up Anita Desais exquisite new book. Set in modern India, but where history still casts a long shadow, the stories move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement.
In ‘The Museum of Final Journeys an unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures, each sent home by the absent, itinerant master. As he is taken through the estate, wondering whether to save these precious relics, he reaches the final - greatest - gift of all, looming out of the shadows.
In ‘Translator, Translated, middle-aged Prema meets her successful publisher friend Tara at a school reunion. Tara hires her as a translator, but Prema, buoyed by her work and the sense of purpose it brings, begins deliberately to blur the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unravelling her desires and achievements.
The final story is of Ravi, living hermit-like in the burnt-out shell of his family home high up in the Himalayan mountains. He cultivates not only silence and solitude but a secret hidden away in the woods, concealed from sight. When a film crew from Delhi intrude upon his seclusion, it compels him to withdraw even further until he magically and elusively disappears…
Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these stories remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.
Review
"Through the deceptively simple juxtaposition of opposites and the interweaving and repetition of themes in these two narratives, Desai builds a complex and elegant fiction." Boston Globe
"Desai is more than smart; she's an undeniable genius." The Washington Post
"What a pleasure! She is really one of the most accomplished novelists writing today-- the book flows like water, it comes like a gift to the parched. Heart-rending, yes of course, being about how rescue never comes, but so alive in its appreciation of life's consolations as to be quite magical." -- Fay Weldon
"Short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize, Desai's stunning new novel...looks gently but without sentimentality at an Indian family...she has much to say in this graceful, supple novel about the inability of the families in either culture to nurture their children." Publishers Weekly, Starred
"Anita Desai is considered one of the foremost Indian authors writing in English. Her novels convey the tangled complexities of Indian tradition, with an economy of language that is clean, simple and elegantly straightforward." The Denver Post
"It is Desai's great accomplishment to portray the worlds of the brother and sister as not simply opposites (as the title might suggest), but as sharing similar forces of family pressure, parental expectation and sibling rivalry. Desai's characters are wonderfully, fallibly human as they wend their way through the maze of everyday domestic tensions." The San Francisco Chronicle
"Anita Desai is a wonderfully subtle writer who acheives her powerful and poignant effects by stealth rather than direct action." Salon
"Fasting, Feasting posits food as a metaphoer for emotional sustenance. Everything centers around food. Desai, who teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells the story with lapidary prose, creating intimate scenes as detailed as Indian miniature paintings. An accumulation of small details as steady and fine as drops of small rain create and eventual flood that drowns the happiness and the hopes of both Arun and Uma." The Seattle Times
"The Indian-born novelist and MIT writing instructor (Desai) deftly conveys the comic horror of escaping the constraints of family and navigating an alien culture, in this case, ours." Boston Magazine
"The peerless chronicler . . . [of] a world which is already disappearing." The Independent
Review
A "beautifully written, richly textured, and haunting story" (Chaim Potok), BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY is Anita Desai's classic novel of the Holocaust era, a story of profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The novel follows Hugo Baumgartner as he flees Nazi Germany -- and his Jewish heritage -- for India, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war's end. In this tale of a man who, "like a figure in a Greek tragedy . . . seems to elude his destiny" (NEW LEADER), Desai's "capacious intelligence, her unsentimental compassion" (NEW REPUBLIC) reach their full height.
"Beautifully written, richly textured . . . [a] haunting story." -- Chaim Potok
"A triumph." New Republic
Review
PRAISE "...
poignant and wry...a
deft exploration of the limits people place on themselves by trying to cling to the past."
--Kirkus Reviews "This collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict."
--Publishers Weekly
Review
"In three
ensnaring novellas of consummate artistry and profoundly disquieting perceptions, master storyteller Desai reflects on the transforming power and devastating limitations of art... Desais
provocative and mysterious tales of displacement trace the reverberations when the dream of art collides with crushing reality." --
Booklist, starred "...
poignant and wry...a
deft exploration of the limits people place on themselves by trying to cling to the past."
--Kirkus Reviews "This collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict."
--Publishers Weekly
Review
"[Q]uiet, meticulous, unflinching meditations on the trajectories of three contemporary lives, and on the Indian cultures and landscapes that helped shape them." --San Francisco Chronicle "[A] collection of three superb novellas…. deceptively subtle, slightly surreal and profoundly insightful fiction of a world-class writer...These evocative stories about art and culture are sewn deeply into the fraying fabric of modern-day India. The only thing little about this book is its size." --The Washington Post "...eloquent and understated...[Desai's prose is] distinguished by its sober, often bracing prose, its patient eye for all-telling detail and its humane but penetrating intelligence..." --The New York Times Book Review "'[Desai] proves you can go home again...stirring..." --Marie Claire "In three ensnaring novellas of consummate artistry and profoundly disquieting perceptions, master storyteller Desai reflects on the transforming power and devastating limitations of art... Desais provocative and mysterious tales of displacement trace the reverberations when the dream of art collides with crushing reality." --Booklist, starred "...poignant and wry...a deft exploration of the limits people place on themselves by trying to cling to the past." --Kirkus Reviews "This collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict." --Publishers Weekly
Review
“A wonderful novel about silence and music, about the partition of a family as well as a nation.”
The New York Times
“A rich, Chekhovian novel by one of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers.”
The New Yorker
Review
"Deceptions and obsessions drive this elegant collection of four stories...Playful, teasing, provocative fare from this most accomplished of ironists." Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"These novellas are prime examples of Ozicks rigorous writing style, her propensity for recognizing the element of ridiculousness in human tragedy, and her second-nature sympathy for eccentric characters." Booklist, ALA, Starred Review
"A carefully honed, sharply intelligent new collection of four stories shows Ozick at the height of her stylistic powers...Ozick's stories ingeniously put scholarship in the service of human flowerings." Publishers Weekly
"Ozick is at the top of her form in these splendid stories, and every library will want a copy. Highly recommended." Library Journal Starred
Synopsis
Short-listed three times for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai explores time and transformation in these artful novellas
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between lifes expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desais characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.
Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spiders web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings—as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.
Synopsis
Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious, estranged sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface and blend into a domestic drama that is intensely beautiful and leads to profound self-understanding.
Synopsis
Four stories of comedy, deception, and revenge, including one previously unpublished, from the acclaimed author of Heir to the Glimmering World.
Cynthia Ozicks new work of fiction brings together four long stories that showcase this incomparable writers sly humor and piercing insight into the human heart. Each starts in the comic mode, with heroes who suffer from willful self-deceit. These not-so-innocents proceed from self-deception to deceiving others, who do not take it lightly. Revenge is the consequence -- and for the reader, a delicious, if dark, recognition of emotional truth.
The glorious new novella Dictation” imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of Jamess Miss Bosanquet, high-spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity.
Ozick is at her most devious, delightful best in these four works, illuminating the ease with which comedy can glide into calamity.
Synopsis
Award-winning novelist Anita Desai explores time and transformation in three artful novellas, set in modern India.
Synopsis
"Desai is more than smart; shes an undeniable genius."--
Washington Post Book World"[Desai] makes the apparently exotic . . . seem as universal, as vital and familiar, as the food on our plates."--Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review
"Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture."--Alison Lurie
Synopsis
Distraught by her own lack of accomplishment -- especially in comparison to that of a childhood rival who has become a famous and successful publisher -- a middle-aged woman has the opportunity of a lifetime: to translate the work of an unknown literary star and, in the process, impress the woman she most admires.
Synopsis
Set in modern India, these three novellas move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. An unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures where he discovers a surprise "relic." A translator blurs the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unraveling her desires and achievements. In the title novella, a hermit hidden away in the woods with a secret is discovered by a film crew, which compels him to withdraw even further until he magically disappears…
Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these novellas remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.
Synopsis
Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
“The excellent strength [the novellas] share is a gracefulness and dreamlike sonority, reminiscent of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and W.G. Sebald, wherein strange evolutions of solitary lives are the rule, and readers are held by the stately, hypnotic dignity of the voice that tells them.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Set in modern India, these three novellas move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. An unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures where he discovers a surprise "relic." A translator blurs the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unraveling her desires and achievements. In the title novella, a hermit hidden away in the woods with a secret is discovered by a film crew, which compels him to withdraw even further until he magically disappears . . .
Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these novellas remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.
“Desai, at her best, offers enchanting, subtle, and deeply observed portraits of layered characters trapped between worlds.” – Daily Beast
“Lingers in the memory the same way these landscapes and people of India prove impossible to forget.” – Boston Globe
Synopsis
In her long, distinguished career, Anita Desai has focused her capacious vision on questions of culture and identity. Her mesmerizing new novel, The Zigzag Way, brings her fiction to an unexpected region of the world: mythical, lush Mexico. In this seductive landscape, a young American stumbles upon an unlikely path to self-discovery.
Eric is a newly minted historian just out of graduate school, unsure of his past choices and future options. With no clear direction, he follows his lover, Em, when she travels to the Yucatan for her scientific research, but he ends up alone in this foreign place. And so he pursues his own private quest, tracing his family's history to a Mexican ghost town, where, a hundred years earlier, young Cornish miners toiled to the death. With vivid sympathy, Desai conjures the struggles of Eric's grandparents and their community.
Now, in place of the Cornish workers, the native Huichol Indians suffer the cruelty of the mines. When he inquires into their lives, Eric provokes the ire of their self-appointed savior, Dona Vera. Known as the "Queen of the Sierra," Dona Vera is the widow of a mining baron who has dedicated her fortune to preserving the Huichol culture. But her formidable presence belies a dubious past.
The zigzag paths of these characters converge on the Day of the Dead, bringing together past and present in a moment of powerful epiphany. Haunting and atmospheric, with splashes of exuberant color and darker violence, The Zigzag Way is a magical novel of elegiac beauty.
Synopsis
Anita Desai's new book, hailed as "unsparing, yet tender and funny,"* brilliantly confirms her place among today's foremost Indian writers. FASTING, FEASTING takes on Desai's greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family. Published in Britain to rave reviews, FASTING, FEASTING is "rich in the sensuous atmosphere, elegiac pathos, and bleak comedy at which the author excels" (The Spectator). From the overpowering warmth of Indian culture to the cool center of the American family, it captures the physical -- and emotional -- fasting and feasting that define two distinct cultures. *(Times Literary Supplement)
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.
About the Author
Author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, CYNTHIA OZICK is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Harper's, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.
Table of Contents
Contents PART IEric Arrives PART IIVera Stays PART IIIBetty Departs PART IVLa Noche de los Muertos