Search Results

“... Narayan has written a postscript to his new novel which ought to have been a foreword, since it answers the exclamation practically every reader will make on seeing it: ‘Such a short novel!’ One hundred and nineteen pages of large print would hardly make a novella: it is only slightly more than a short story. Narayan is perfectly aware of this inevitable reaction from his devoted readers, who can never have enough of Malgudi ...”

“... as discussed in an irrational, pedantic manner by a British admirer of Flaubert’s work. Anita Desai, daughter of a German mother and a Bengali father, writes about the world of Indian poets, a very male (not macho) group devoted to the Urdu language as it struggles against ‘that vegetarian monster, Hindi’. This novel, In Custody, is for me ...”

“... if you’re good you don’t drop any.’ Well, anyone who agrees with Parks should be happy with Anita Desai. Her plots are minimal, her characters few, her voice low, her style and structure traditional, and, best of all, she is a sensitive analyst of what Parks calls ‘the inner life’; and funny, besides. But she does have one thing in common with ...”

“... a denizen (the only word that fits) of Bombay, and how he comes to be there is the story Anita Desai chooses to tell in a book that puts to shame all the little epithets and pert clichés that praise may offer. Baumgartner’s Bombay is complex in event but simple in plot. There are no eddies in the narrative, no tricks of concealment and sudden ...”

“... seem marked by an ‘excessive Rushdie-itis’. How could they not, when even an older writer like Anita Desai has found herself affected by his raspily raucous voice? Roy, too, has had her style pawed by Rushdie’s. His fingerprints show in the way she makes a cinema usher into ‘The Man with the steel Eveready Torch’, a man who tells his customers ...”

“... his language is his grandmother’s. ‘She spoke that way.’ ‘She was a great storyteller.’ Anita Desai has said of Indian households that the women are the keepers of the tales, and the same appears to be the case in South America. Marquez was raised by his grandparents, meeting his mother for the first time when he was seven or eight years ...”

“... In Anita Desai’s recent novel Fasting, Feasting, there is a delicately framed moment of what looks like reconciliation. An unmarried daughter has seen her last chance of a career and a life independent from the family vanish into the demands of her mother’s real or feigned illness. Feigned, the daughter is sure: the crafty parental stranglehold ...”