The artist of disappearance

Review by New York Times Review

SOMETIMES a mango is just a mango. This is rarely the case in Indian novels, where mangoes tend to be luminescent orbs dangling in steamy air, glistening with sweetness, sex and Being itself, waiting to be plucked, caressed, birthed. Either that or they're muddy and rotten and piled high on a dirty road, surrounded by rancid garbage, rank cooking fires, beggar children and grinning, greasy swindlers. In other words, mangoes in India's literary fiction are much like India in literary fiction: distinguished by pleasing aromas or permanent anarchy, if not some chutneyed combination. For almost five decades, Anita Desai's writing has avoided this easy trafficking in the delicious and malicious. She has instead created a body of work distinguished by its sober, often bracing prose, its patient eye for all-telling detail and its humane but penetrating intelligence about middling people faced with middling prospects. Whether in India, Mexico or America, Desai's characters tend to be easy marks for new possibilities - for something, anything, other than life as it is. This vulnerability leads to promising experiences, which often become fresh disappointments. For a writer so taken with such arrangements, the best results are minor-key masterpieces; the lesser efforts are melancholy suffocations. Both outcomes are evident in the three novellas that make up her new collection, "The Artist of Disappearance." "The Museum of Final Journeys" describes the early stages of an Indian civil Servant's career. Sent to a decrepit rural outpost, he must deal, day by gloomy day, with supplicants petitioning him about convoluted property claims. Spectacularly underwhelmed by his monotonous duties and their depressing locale, he copes by lapsing into a drowsing wakefulness - until an old man implores him to visit a nearby estate that he says has been transformed into a museum and then abandoned by its eccentric owners. The young bureaucrat is skeptical, but as a relief from boredom goes anyway, only to discover a series of falling-down rooms filled with wondrous prints, textiles and objects from distant places, as well as a bamboo grove occupied by a pathetic, chained elephant. Enlivened by what he's found, he realizes that the seemingly "meek, obsequious" old retainer is more accurately, and distressingly, "a small, determined man doggedly performing his duties to the last" - attempting to secure government support for the failing estate. WILL the young man find his purpose in saving this strange museum or will he be absorbed into its decline? As he considers what to do, the story suddenly jumps forward, midsentence, to the civil servant looking back many years later, without much feeling or interest, at this posting as part of the larger story of his average life and typical career. After she has superbly built up the suspense of her narrative, Desai's snapped-apart transition to a desultory valediction is disappointingly fragmentary, a devaluation of our finely developed investment in this man's life. In contrast, the title novella is a slowdrip tale about a sensitive recluse named Ravi, who survives his decadent, self-destructive parents and creates an intricate stone artwork in the woods near a North Indian hill station. When the place is chanced upon by a young woman who works for a documentary film crew searching for evidence of environmental degradation, this accidental discovery - confusing, then terrifying, then exciting for the young woman - offers a jolt of energy, but it's not enough. Throughout, Ravi's sensibility is both too dark and too precious: when he's not doing his therapeutic art-scaping in the woods, he's moping around the burned remains of his family home or hiding out from visitors. Meanwhile the members of the film crew are mostly variations on listlessness until they find fumable material - first Ravi's delicate glade and then a large-scale mining operation, with its "great gashes that had opened out into caverns of white limestone." Yet this juxtaposition of the artistic and the industrial seems surprisingly stark, coming from a writer of Desai's usual subtlety. The collection is redeemed, however, by the third novella. Eloquent and understated, "Translator Translated" lays bare the soured life of Prema, a middle-aged Delhi English teacher who attends a school reunion where she has a nervous, exhilarating encounter with Tara, a confident and flashy classmate who has since become a player in India's publishing industry. After they agree that Prema will undertake an English translation of a book written in one of India's regional languages, Oriya, excitements and disappointments follow. As Prema tries to reinvent herself as a translator, editor and even author, her energies are consumed by her efforts to catch up with a contemporary who has always seemed so far beyond her. Here Desai quietly, relentlessly exposes the iongings of someone at the slack-end of life, trying to renew it by redressing a perceived early injustice. Happiness for Prema is not just seeing her name on a pubUshed book, it's also visiting Tara in her office to chat about future projects - at last, as equals. But she tries too hard, makes bad decisions and eventually concludes that she is merely "a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to," one of those who have "had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlit world beyond," only to see "that window close and remain closed." At her finest, Desai is a brilliant anatomist of people like Prema - men and women who seek, gain, but fail to triumph in such moments and are left to play their own kind of solitaire, matching what was to what might have been. Desai's characters glimpse 'the open, sunlit world,' only to see 'that window close and remain closed.' Randy Boyagoda's second novel, "Beggar's Feast," was recently published in Canada. He teaches literature at Ryerson University and is writing a biography of Richard John Neuhaus.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2012]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In three ensnaring novellas of consummate artistry and profoundly disquieting perceptions, master storyteller Desai (The Zigzag Way, 2004) reflects on the transforming power and devastating limitations of art. In The Museum of Final Journeys, an Anglo magistrate in a district deep in the impoverished flatlands of India accepts an elderly caretaker's beseeching invitation to visit the vast estate his employer has abandoned. In the dilapidated mansion, he finds a treasury of exquisite objects collected the world over, now forgotten artifacts in exile, their luster and stories lost. In Translator Translated, a tale of brilliantly refined suspense, Prema, an English teacher dulled by routine and loneliness, seizes the opportunity to translate the work of an author writing in her little-known mother tongue and is soon in way over her head. As Desai charts Prema's cruel exposure, she considers the plight of indigenous languages, the ethics of translation, and the heartbreak of those seeking affirmation in the creations of others. In The Artist of Disappearance, Ravi, the unloved adopted son of frivolous wealthy parents, finally returns to his beloved Himalayan home to live simply and creatively, immersed in the glory of nature, only to witness its destruction. Desai's provocative and mysterious tales of displacement trace the reverberations when the dream of art collides with crushing reality.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Desai's unsettling collection of novellas explores the slow, threatening creep of outside influence into closed communities. In "The Museum of Final Journeys," an isolated bureaucrat is confronted with a "chamber of death," a remote, bizarre museum full of embalmed, stuffed animals. "Translator Translated" obliquely explores colonial politics when Prema, a professor specializing in Suvarna Devi, an obscure writer writing in Oriya, Prema's native language, befriends a glamorous former classmate by offering to translate Devi's work into English. But by doing so, she comes under fire for not only bringing the text into the language of the colonizers but also for crippling the writer's work. The elliptical titular story explores the origins of a hermetic man, the last of an unhappy family. The man wants nothing to do with the outside world, but has an ornate garden a trio of students want to film. As the landscape resists them, so the students come to resent each other's demands and wish to forget the disrespect they've visited upon the reclusive inhabitants. Desai (Village by the Sea) treads lightly, at times too lightly, but at its best this collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict. (Dec. 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

These three novellas by internationally acclaimed author Desai (The Zigzag Way) powerfully explore the despair that comes from unfulfilled dreams. In The Museum of Final Journeys, a young government officer is posted to a remote village, where he finds only stultifying work in depressing conditions. When he is asked to take care of the luxurious and bizarre treasures of a decaying estate, he is forever haunted by his decision. In Translator Translated, English teacher Prema rises out of her torpid life to translate a book of stories written in a little-known language. Her desperation to find fulfillment in the author's work leads her to confuse her role and results in unfortunate consequences. In the title story, Ravi lives a hermetic life in the burnt ruin of his childhood home, creating art out of nature, until a film crew discovers his masterpiece and Ravi is faced with the desecration of his art. VERDICT These stories are heart-wrenching in their portrayal of desperate people clinging to the fragility of hope. Beautifully written, this book will appeal especially to lovers of Indian literature. [See Prepub Alert, 6/13/11.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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We had driven for never-ending miles along what seemed to be more a mudbank than a road between fields of viru lent green - jute? rice? what was it this benighted hinter - land produced? I ought to have known, but my head was pounded into too much of a daze by the heat and the sun and the fatigue to take in what my driver was telling me in answer to my listless questions.   The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow. This was the circuit house where I was to stay until I had found a place of my own. As a very junior officer, a mere subdivisional officer in the august government service, it was all I could expect, a temporary place for one of its minor servants. There was nothing around but fields and dirt roads and dust, no lights or signs of a town to be seen. Noting my disappointment and hesitation at the first sight of my new residence - where had we come to? - the driver climbed out first, lifted my bags from the back of the jeep and led the way up the broad steps to a long veranda which had doors fitted with wire screens one could not see through. He clapped his hands and shouted, 'Koi hai?' I had not imagined anyone still used that imperious announcement from the days of the Raj: Anyone there? But perhaps, in this setting, itself a leftover from the empire, not so incongruous at all. Besides, there was no bell and one cannot knock on a screen door.   I didn't think anyone had heard. Certainly no light went on and no footsteps were to be heard, but in a bit someone came around the house from the back where there must have been huts or quarters for servants.   'I've brought the new officer-sahib,' the driver announced officiously (he wore a uniform of sorts, khaki, with lettering in red over the shirt pocket that gave him the right). 'Open a room for him. And switch on some lights, will you?'   'No lights,' the man replied with dignity. He wore no uniform, only some loose clothing, and his feet were bare, but he held his back straight and somehow established his authority. 'Power cut.'   'Get a lantern then,' the driver barked. He clearly enjoyed giving orders.   I didn't, and was relieved when the chowkidar - for clearly he was the watchman for all his lack of a uniform - took over my bags and the driver turned to leave. It was night now, and when I saw the headlights of the jeep sweep over the dark foliage that crowded against the house and lined the driveway, then turn around so that the tail lights could be seen to dwindle and disappear, I felt my heart sinking. I did not want to stay in this desolate place, I wanted to run after the jeep, throw myself in and return to a familiar scene. I was used to city life, to the cacophony of traffic, the clamour and din and discordancy of human voices, the pushing and shoving of humanity, all that was absent here.   While I stood waiting on the veranda for a lamp to be lit so I could be shown to my room, I listened to the dry, grating crackle of palm leaves over the roof, the voices of frogs issuing low warnings from some invisible pond or swamp nearby, and these sounds were even more disquieting than the silence.   A lighted lantern was finally brought out and I followed its ghostly glow in, past large, looming pieces of furniture, to the room the chowkidar opened for me. It released a dank odour of mildew as of a trunk opened after a long stretch of time and a death or two, and I thought this was surely not a chapter of my life; it was only a chapter in one of those novels I used to read in my student days, something by Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle or Wilkie Collins (I had been a great reader then and secretly hoped to become a writer). I remembered, too, the hated voice of the gym master at school shouting 'Stiffen up now, boys, stiffen up!' and I nearly laughed - a bitter laugh.   All the actions that one performs automatically and habitually in the real world, the lighted world - of bathing, dressing, eating a meal - here had to be performed in a state of almost gelid slow motion. I carried the lantern into the bathroom with me - it created grotesquely hovering shadows rather than light, and made the slimy walls and floor glisten dangerously - and made do with a rudimentary bucket of water and a tin mug. To put on a clean set of clothes when I could scarcely make out what I had picked from my suitcase (packed with an idiotic lack of good sense: a tie? when would I ever wear a tie in this pit?) and then to find my way to the dining room and sit down to a meal placed before me that I could scarcely identify - was it lentils, or a mush of vegetables, and was this whitish puddle rice or what? - all were manoeuvres to be carried out with slow deliberation, so much so that they seemed barely worthwhile, just habits belonging to another world and time carried on weakly. The high-pitched whining of mosquitoes sounded all around me and I slapped angrily at their invisible presences.   Then, with a small explosion, the electricity came on and lights flared with an intensity that made me flinch. An abrupt shift took place. The circuit house dining room, the metal bowls and dishes set on the table, the heavy pieces of furniture, the yellow curry stains on the tablecloth all revealed themselves with painful clarity while the whine of mosquitoes faded with disappointment. Now large, winged ants insinuated their way through the wire screens and hurled themselves at the electric bulb suspended over my head; some floated down into my plate where they drowned in the gravy, wings detaching themselves from the small, floundering worms of their bodies.   I pushed back my chair and rose so precipitately, the chowkidar came forward to see what was wrong. I saw no point in telling him that everything was. Instructing him abruptly to bring me tea at six next morning, I returned to my room. It felt like a mercy to turn off the impudent light dangling on a cord over my bed and prepare to throw myself into it for the night.   I had not taken the mosquito net that swaddled the bed into account. First I had to fumble around for an opening to crawl in, then tuck it back to keep out the mosquitoes. At this I failed, and those that found themselves trapped in the netting with me, furiously bit at every exposed surface they could find. What was more, the netting prevented any breath of air reaching me from the sluggishly revolving fan overhead.   Throughout the night voices rang back and forth in my head: would I be able to go through with this training in a remote outpost that was supposed to prepare me for great deeds in public service? Should I quit now before I became known as a failure and a disgrace? Could I appeal to anyone for help, some mentor, or possibly my father, retired now from this very service, his honour and his pride intact like an iron rod he had swallowed?   Across the jungle, or the swamp or whatever it was that surrounded this isolated house, pai dogs in hamlets and homesteads scattered far apart echoed the voices in my head, some questioning and plaintive, others fierce and challenging.   If I had not been 'stiffened up' in school and by my father, I might have shed a tear or two into my flat grey pillow. I came close to it but morning rescued me. Excerpted from The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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