Book captures the slow debilitation of ambition and spirit of its characters, and their isolation.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: In one of the finest works of her career, Anita Desai’s “The Artist of Disappearance”, which came out last 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.
The three novellas are also a hark back to the past for Desai, with the stories, settings and the underlying themes subtly leavened and honed from some of her best works set in India, a place she once acknowledged in an interview that she couldn’t write of it with “the same intensity and familiarity” that she once had. Her last novel, “The Zigzag Way”, was based in Mexico.
But this feeling of displacement for Desai, who is a professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is nowhere in evidence in the three novellas.
In the opening novella, “The Museum of Final Journeys”, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer-in-training, posted for his stint in a small town near a hill station, presumably Darjeeling, goes through the angst of being marooned in the boondocks of civilization. The unnamed character’s plight and loneliness is reminiscent of Agastya Sen, in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s “English, August”.
In Desai’s story, the cynicism of the work he has to deal with makes the young officer bemoan his fate: “While others dreamt dreams and lived lives of imaginations and adventure, my role was only to take care of the mess left by them.”
As if his sub-conscious dreamed, or demanded it, a fable-like tale unfolds for him in the hills, when he comes to know through a caretaker of a once-wealthy estate of a curious museum located inside the dilapidated mansion on the estate. The museum is stored with exquisite artifacts from East Asia – including, paintings, manuscripts, kimonos and fans, masks, fur, shells, textiles and porcelain – sent years ago by the only child of the Bengali couple who owned the estate.
After his father died, the son, educated in the best schools in India and in the West, returns home, only to leave again on travels supported by his mother selling her jewelry. He never comes back, but kept sending his mother boxes of these gifts, to be stored in rooms inside the mansion. His last gift, and the novella’s twist in the tale, was literally a white elephant, which forces the mother into penury, and the estate in shambles. She relinquishes the estate, leaves for Varanasi, handing over the upkeep of the museum to the caretaker, who now beseeches the officer to hand it over to the government.
The narration has a dream-like quality to it; but the magical realism is tinged with the underlying, crystal clear poverty that cocoons it. The quest for adventure and freedom which the officer craves for, and mirrored through the travels of the estate scion, is also replete with disillusionment, and the failed, sad lives of the landed Bengali gentry of the past.
The theme of a “provincial museum,” ensconced in a time warp, and replete with memories and values which hold different meaning for different people, is not new for Desai, having dealt with it in her novel “Clear Light of Day”.
But in “The Museum of Final Journeys”, Desai, with remarkable perspicuity, also brings out the stark contrast between compulsive, obsessive nature to acquire property, the sentiment of modern India, versus, the moral aesthetics of an India of the past.
The second novella “Translator Translated, like The Museum of Final Journeys” has the underlying theme of disillusionment, and the quest to break free from the throttling clutches of boredom and ennui from a profession that has lost all its glamor within a short span of time.
Prema Joshi, a middle-aged spinster, who teaches grudgingly English literature in a college in Delhi, lives in a world shaped by her past, her love for the Oriya language, the mother-tongue of her mother, who got married to an IAS officer posted in her hometown. The father abhors the language once he is posted in Delhi. But Joshi nurtures the language, learns it, and reveres an Oriya writer, Suvarna Devi, whose short stories have enthralled her. When a former classmate at school, who is now a famous publisher, invites Joshi to translate Devi’s literature, her world goes into a tailspin, from a high point.
The most fast-paced of the three novellas, but with a sense of foreboding to it, it explores with unsparing candor the dynamics and complexities of human relationships. Joshi’s plight is perhaps universal, the quest for virtuous reward and recognition trumpeted by the stark realities of mundane life.
Joshi’s quest to make Devi a better writer through her translation, which spurs her on to believe herself to be a co-author, also leads her to spurn life around her. She scoffs at her teaching job, scorning the girls she taught in college: “She could not be bothered: every one of these girls would leave college to marry, bear children, and, to everyone’s huge relief, never read another book.”
But when reality hits her later in life, after her dreams have been quashed, Joshi ruminates: “Whyever did I imagine I was different, and could live differently from them? We are all in this together, this world of loss and defeat. All of us, every one of us, has had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlight world beyond, but all of us, on this bus, have had that window close and remain closed.”
The characters of Joshi and Devi might well be compared to the central characters of Desai’s novel “In Custody” – also made into a film by Ismail Merchant – the poet Nur, and his ardent devotee, the professor of Hindi, Deven.
Desai, who in past novels, has dealt with the alienation of women in their environs, is on firm ground in “Translator Translated”. But the novella also stands out for the urban conflict it brings to the fore. Joshi’s character, who epitomizes the conflict between the parallel worlds of an English-speaking elite India, versus the indigenous lot, gives a new sheen to a trite theme. Even as her dreams and aspirations fade away, Joshi’s spirit remains afloat.
The title novella of the book has all the settings and elements that Desai has reveled in the past: self-imposed isolation in the hills, a powerful theme that was the basis of her Sahitya Academy Award winning novel, “Fire on the Mountain”, that came out in 1977.
Desai’s brooding novella is also an ode to her love for the hills and nature – she was born in Mussoorie – and an incisive look into the life of the Indian bourgeoisie, set in the time when the British were still in India.
In “The Artist of Disappearance”, Ravi, a young man who shuns city life despite being given the opportunities there, sequesters himself in a burned mansion, and the grounds around it in a hill station, that once belonged to his parents. The story has multiple parallel threads and themes; the idea of utopia mired with the modern perils of mining and deforestation; as well as aesthetic art in conflict with commercial art.
Ravi’s lack of interest in progress and civilization is at odds with the rapid life that swirls around him: a set of filmmakers and camerapersons from Delhi descend onto the mansion and invade a secret glade that he has made for himself; rampant commercial development; and erosion of a beautiful life gone by, never to be replaced.
In “The Artist of Disappearance”, Desai has created stagnant worlds that seek secret solace in memories and the eccentricities of an age gone by, but have to contend with the reality of the unforgiving, unrelenting present. They are as fragile as the still waters of a puddle on a road.
With her exquisite eye for detail, Desai has rendered three nuggets of perfection in story-telling in “The Artist of Disappearance”. It is a book that resonates long after once the pages are done turning over, reading of lives lived for perdition. (Global India Newswire)