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the-south-asian.com October 2004 |
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October
2004 Heritage
Books Between
Heaven and Hell
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ANITA DESAI - 4 decades of prose by Gyan Marwah
Anita Desai is back with her magical prose. But in her new book The Zigzag Way the celebrated Indian writer is where she is usually not - a place far away from India. Mexico - to be precise. Writing for her is no meteoric burst or a stylistic flash. She believes in an `idea'. A scrap of news or a face seen in a bus is enough for her to weave a story. "Each of my stories has taken years to take shape. I keep turning them over and over in my mind, choosing and discarding bits, till a pattern and design emerges," says Anita Desai, whose 40-year literary journey began with Cry, the Peacock. Her last work, Fasting, Feasting (Chato & Windus) was short listed for the Booker Prize, which further consolidated Desai's international reputation showcasing her immense skill in handling complex inter-relationships. In her new The Zigzag Way the celebrated Indian writer is where she’s usually not - a place far away from India. Mexico - to be precise. Though she does come to India to meet her husband and son, but she says she’s becoming a stranger to the country of her birth. "I visit India every year but I can no longer relate to it. That’s why I have set The Zigzag Way in Mexico which is very similar to India yet very different," says Desai. Today, Anita Desai has ten novels, a volume of short stories and three children's books to her credit. She has been nominated thrice for the Booker and her 1997 novel, Baumgartner's Bombay earned her the prestigious Harold Ribalow Prize. It was the tale of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jew who fled war torn Germany and settled in Bombay with a retinue of stray cats. The central theme was homelessness and acceptance in another place and time. Explains Desai: " As a young girl, I had known people like that. They were strangely eccentric, obvious foreigners, not belonging to Indian society." Her 1996 novel, Journey To Ithaca (Heinneman) started in Italy where an Italian boy, Matteo and his German wife Sophie impressed by the writings of the eastern spiritualist, Herman Hesse, set off on a hippy trail of India.The book, described by some overseas critics as Desai's most powerful work to date, is more about banishment than about a journey. It examines at close quarters how foreigners especially from the West react to India in different ways. Desai won the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature for Fire on the Mountain, her fifth novel. Clear Light of Day, her sixth, was short-listed for the Booker-McConnel Prize. The children's story, The Village by the Sea, won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction and was serialised by BBC in 1995. A recipient of the Padma Shri, Desai recently delighted audiences in Delhi by reading excerpts from her novels and speaking about her experiences as a writer. Far from discoursing, she adopted a question-answer approach, providing the answers from her own works and personal experiences. The greying coiffure, the unostentatious cotton sari worn with matronly grace and the soft voice suggested the maturity of one of India's best-known novelists. The painstakingly perfected chiselling is perhaps the secret of her three and a half decade-long success. Cry, the Peacock was hailed by London's Daily Telegraph as "a poetry-novel, from a highly original, intense and perceptive artiste." Desai, however, has refrained from commenting on the novel as it belonged to a period of her life when she was still growing up and had not yet broken free of restraints. Despite widespread critical and reader appreciation of her subtle handling of inter-relationships and interweaving of the narratives, Desai is still not satisfied with her craft despite her new book The Zigzag Way being hailed as another masterpiece. " My earlier books were born out of great isolation. I was a young woman with no experience of an outer world," says she. The change-over in her later novels, she says, was the break-off from those shackles. " Finishing one book is like leaving one stage of life, or else one goes on endlessly, repeating the theme." While she hardly remembers her early books, Clear Light of Day was a landmark in her career. "It marked my breaking out," says she, explaining also the change that came over her use of language. She incorporated the rhythm and tone of Indian speech into English and the effect was described as "four-dimensional" by noted critic Gabrielle Annan in the Times Literary Supplement. Deft Characterisation The total effect of her novels has earned Desai the acclaim of critics. Her works are delightfully pleasing because of the fragility and vulnerability of the main characters. The inner landscape she portrays and which appeals to the readers owes largely to her deftness in characterisation. " One thread in myself sees an interest in characters who don't represent the mundane," says Desai, acknowledging the importance she attaches to this aspect. They neither are not ordinary individuals nor are they violent revolutionaries. And yet, " They have the courage to swim against the tide". She acknowledges her debt to Constantine. P. Cavafy's Greek poem, The Grand Refusal, which eulogizes the courage to say what one feels. "I use this poem as a guideline in my characterization" Desai's characters are not typecast forms injected into content. They keep changing. The earlier ones were isolated individuals harbouring a private angst. Now, juxtaposed on a demanding milieu, they are not comfortably ensconced within society but are trying to pull along. The struggle ends in failure, as they are never able to come to terms with their outward circumstances. Being in the forefront of the contemporary crop of Indian writers in English, Desai is widely read. She draws a distinction between her kind of writers and her predecessors. "It is very interesting to see change in the Indian literary scene," she says. A decade ago, the feeling was that Indian English writing was on the wane. " It seemed a very exhausted, spent scene. And yet, there is a whole generation of writers in their 30s and 40s with lively and energetic styles." This, she says, has restored her confidence about Indian writing in English and in Indian writers, too. " It takes courage to say that this is the way we handle it in India." She herself has not faced any tension as a creative writer in English as she comes from an English-speaking family and was educated through the English medium. "In those early years, we were not even conscious of this awkwardness, and it was only after writing three or four books and meeting other writers that this subconsciously surfaced. I was an Indian writing in English, but without using Indianisms. The language was not used as a tool for caricature or parody, but as an interesting aspect of fiction writing." Now, she has come into her own. It explains why literary circles abroad are so excited about her latest book The Zigzag Way which some critics are saying is her best effort so far in her 40-year-old literary journey. The book has received glowing tributes and is moving fast from the shelves of bookstores. *****
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