Desai debuts as novella writer

In one of the finest works of her career, Anita Desai's latest book, The Artist of Disappearance, coming out later this year, comprising three novellas, her first offering after seven years since The Zigzag Way, captures with pervasive intensity the slow debilitation of ambition and spirit of its characters, and their isolation, to the point of self-flagellation of mind, memory and existence.

Desai, 74, has had success in writing both short stories and novels in a career that spans over six decades now. She published her first story when she was nine years old. Two of her novels, Clear Light of Day published in 1980, and In Custody in 1984, were nominated for the Booker Awards for Fiction, now known as the Man Booker Award.

Her collection of short stories, "Fasting, Feasting", in 1999, also got short-listed for the same award. But it is perhaps in the art of the novella, that strange depth of the literary canyon where it is difficult to fathom if the echo from below has reached the top or not, that Desai is strikingly brilliant in capturing with intricate detail and the right kind of pace the life of her characters and plots, exploring deftly various nuances of tedium, isolation and eccentricities, without satiating or saturating too early.

Full report here International Business Times

The Books Interview: Anita Desai

Each of the novellas in your new book has a melancholic feel. What prompted that mood?
I think maybe it comes of my no longer living in India. All of these stories are based on memory and past experience. I miss India intensely, especially when I'm writing, because it remains my subject. After more than 20 years abroad, it remains the material of all of my work. So I'm constantly mining treasures of memory.

Has your perception of India changed?
I go back constantly. I'm in touch with family and friends there. But to be a visitor is very different from being a resident. If your mind exists there, your poetry exists there, but bodily you're elsewhere . . . it creates a kind of weird disconnect.

In two of the stories, you evoke a colonial age. What draws you to that time?
It's the era I grew up in. It was post-colonial, but newly post-colonial. The old elements of the colonial were still clinging to it. It's what I grew up in and it's what I do best. So when I return to India now, I see how the past has gone and been replaced.

The 19th-century English novel crops up often in these stories. Was it a central part of your education?
I was giving all the characters my own experience and the kind of education I had in old Delhi, but I do suggest that it seems faded to the younger generation. I notice in India today that people read differently. I always think what you read is what forms your mind, what makes you.

Full interview here New Statesman

Mystique of Mumbai

In her book City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay, Gillian Tindal evoked an image of a nascent city, a tangle of masonry, bazaar and tram lines forging into the swamp. In books set in more recent times (India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Shantaram, Bombay and Mumbai: The City In Transition), we see a proud metropolis hollowed out by desperation, violent self assertion and crime. For a sense of how ordinary people, rich, poor and middle class, negotiate this turbulent landscape, we have the writings of Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Manil Suri and a host of less widely celebrated but much beloved local authors and poets. This treasure trove notwithstanding, one feels, there is still much to be said, much more to be understood about this great and complex city. And it is with pleasant anticipation that one greets Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables.

Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University whose previous books include weighty titles such as Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990) and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). But with Mumbai Fables, a subject he says has preoccupied him for much of the last decade, he seems to have tapped into a less theoretical and more personal register. Explaining his motivation early on in the book, he describes Mumbai, or Bombay, as it then was, as an object of immense fascination and longing for him as a young boy growing up in Patna.

Full report here Indian Express

India is my inspiration: Anita Desai

One of India's most prolific writers, novelist Anita Desai proves to be a "Global Connection" herself.

The truth is that wherever I am, I am Indian, and wherever
I go, I carry India with me. We are inseparable, joined at birth.

Born in Mussoorie, India, the novelist, short-story writer and children's author is the daughter of a Bengali father and German mother. (She is the mother of Kiran Desai, who also is an award-winning author.)

With a career spanning four decades, Desai has written 14 novels and received numerous literary accolades. She has been a finalist for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize three times.

Her novels include Clear Light of Day (1980); In Custody, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984 and made into a film; Baumgartner's Bombay (1987); Fasting, Feasting (1999); and The Zigzag Way (2004).

Educated at Delhi University, Desai now lives in the United States and is an Emeritus Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The acclaimed author talks to CNN about about the inspirations she draws from her homeland.

Full report here CNN

India to be guest country at Turin Book Fair

Literature fans may be rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the 23rd Turin International Book Fair, which kicks off in May and sees India take on the mantel of guest country.

The event takes place at Lingotto Fiere, an old Fiat plant transformed into an exhibition centre in 1985, with publishers attending to discover new talent or thrash out negotiations with current writers and the general public arriving to enjoy the huge array of books and cultural activities that go on.

While two sections are devoted entirely to trade professionals, there is plenty for travellers at accommodation in Turin to do and see.

Among the Indian writers who will be attending the show are Q&A author Vikas Swarup and other top names such as Anita Desai and Anita Nair.

Full report here