Anita Desai | Solitary Lives, Abruptly Interrupted

In the three novellas that make up “The Artist of Disappearance,” Anita Desai uses it twice, in differing circumstances and locations, but to the same convincing and plaintive effect. 

Ms. Desai’s main themes in her new book are decay and disappointment, retreat and regret, so that choice seems highly appropriate. Since the publication of her first novel, “Cry, the Peacock,” nearly 50 years ago, she has often offered portraits of a certain kind of Anglicized urban bourgeoisie or rural landed gentry struggling for meaning against illusions, and “The Artist of Disappearance,” though barely 150 pages, fits neatly into that distinguished body of work.

In “The Museum of Final Journeys,” which opens the book, we’re in the lush, green east of plantations left idle by the emergence of plastic as a substitute for jute. Ms. Desai’s unnamed narrator, “a mere subdivisional officer in the august government service,” is not unlike the protagonist of George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”: a callow bureaucrat charged with administering a rural district whose people and customs he does not understand, and unhappy with the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.

So when the only remaining retainer of the largest estate in the area comes to him, seeking help in preserving a “preposterous collection” of Oriental oddities accumulated by the “young master” of the family in his travels throughout Asia (and who has now vanished), he welcomes the diversion.

At first he sees “only time, and dissolution,” but as he examines the objects, he finds himself “invaded by their poetic melancholy” and “fancying myself a privileged visitor to a past world.” Yet in the end he does nothing, and readers are left wondering what happens to the collection.    

The title novella is set in Mussoorie, a resort in the Himalayan foothills north of Delhi, which happens to be the place where Ms. Desai was born in 1937, the child of a Bengali businessman and a German expatriate. The main character is Ravi, the adopted son of a flighty, prosperous couple with social pretensions that have been rudely batted down, who has returned to the family’s stately hilltop home after an unhappy sojourn in Bombay, seeking nothing but isolation.

Like Nanda Kaul in Ms. Desai’s 1977 novel, “Fire on the Mountain,” also set in a hill station, Ravi is one of life’s walking wounded, uncomfortable in human company, at ease only in nature. Even after the family mansion burns down, he continues to live in its ruins, so intent is he on creating a private garden in a hidden glade. But his solipsistic existence is interrupted when a film crew arrives from Delhi, wanting to make a documentary about the environmental degradation taking place in a modernizing, industrializing India.  

Sandwiched between these two is “Translator Translated,” an example of another of Ms. Desai’s preferred topics: literary and academic politics, which were also the subject of “In Custody,” a 1984 novel later made into a Merchant-Ivory film. Prema Joshi is a “prematurely aged” instructor of English literature at a girls’ college, “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about,” who sees a way out of her malaise when she unexpectedly gets a chance to translate into English a set of short stories written in one of India’s many regional languages.

The focus here is the hierarchy that separates writer and translator, with the latter clearly in an inferior position and frustrated by it, and what happens when a translator violates that order. But Ms. Desai also uses the novella for satiric purposes, perhaps to exact vengeance on some literary nationalists in India; at one point Prema and her publisher attend a conference where they are hectored by “a pudgy man in a sweat-stained suit,” who imperiously demands to know, “What made you decide to translate these stories into a colonial language that was responsible for destroying the original language?”

In recent years Ms. Desai, an emeritus professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has not been especially productive, or focused on India, for that matter. Since “Fasting, Feasting,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999, she has published one novel and a collection of short stories, and there were signs that her inspiration and vigor might be tailing off. 

But her writing here remains striking. On the very first page of the book, for instance, she describes “the sun setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers.” Later there is this description of what happens when a monsoon arrives: “Everything in the house turned damp; the blue fur of mildew crept furtively over any object left standing for the briefest length of time: shoes, bags, boxes, it consumed them all. The sheets on the bed were clammy when he got between them at night, and the darkness rang with the strident cacophony of the big tree crickets that had been waiting for this, their season.”

For her epigraph in “The Artist of Disappearance,” Ms. Desai quotes from “Everness,” a poem by Jorge Luis Borges: “One thing alone does not exist — oblivion.” To disappear may be an art, Ms. Desai goes on to suggest, but it is one that can never be fully realized.

By Larry Rohter, The Guardian, 10 January 2012