The Artist of Disappearance
Anita Desai
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0547840128
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“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
the Himalayas? It had seemed so, but now they found themselves sinking into the familiar sense of defeat at the start of a project, the stage at which they began to doubt if it could be done. 'Wait till tomorrow, we haven't seen anything yet. We've been told about the quarries and the landslides, the tunnelling and the logging. There should be a lot.' 'Where will we find all this, in a holiday resort? We'd better get a guide,' Chand said, and called over to the tea-stall owner, manager, whoever
often enough for Ravi because his parents went abroad during what was known as 'the season' in Mussoorie, when British society came up to the hills to 'escape' from 'the plains' and brought their plays, balls, charades and garden parties with them. Ravi's father sometimes said, wistfully, 'Why don't we spend the summer here for once, Tehmi? It's very jolly, I'm told,' but Tehmi had been brought up—in Bombay and at finishing school in Switzerland—to think summers had to be spent in Nice or
dung and straw, to be milked. Then there was a lull as the activity shifted indoors where a fire of sticks crackled, a pot boiled and the aroma of food was conjured. Around it the children gathered on their haunches, tin plates before them, waiting. The father lowered himself onto a stool, and the mother was finally ready to ladle out the meal she had prepared. But the older of the two boys remained standing by the door, knowing his role in the day's duties. He took the enamel dish from his
stones and sticks straddled it. Here a pine tree leaned precariously over a cliff, its trunk split in two by lightning. Here an orange grove grew in a green clearing, its fruit glowing bright. The dust and odour of the city and plains left behind, the bus rose higher into the mountains where these were replaced by the sharp sweetness of pine woods, the smoke of wood fires, the glass-like clarity of mountain air. He covered the last stretch on foot, rediscovering the paths that led out of the
that whoever still lived there and had not been sent or fetched away, lived in a ruin and increasingly resembled one themselves. Ravi, finding her in a state of despair at the thought of being made to leave the family of cats she had stealthily acquired over time, assured her she need not, that she could stay and 'run the house' for him—as he thought to tell her in a moment of inspiration. It was clear that Miss Wilkinson could run nothing, not the house nor her own life. She had never confessed