FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Artist of DisappearanceBy Anita Desai Chatto &Windus, 156pp. £12.99
REVIEWERS ENJOY drawing comparisons between the writers of the moment and the ones that have gone before – the more exalted the better. It tends to make us stop in our tracks and put the work we are reading into context. To compare Anita Desai’s fiction with that of Chekhov or the short stories of Tolstoy is not extravagant; it is entirely warranted.
Desai, born in India in 1937, to a Bengali father and a German mother, has always been a gifted writer. Her mixed heritage has broadened her vision, which is quietly impressive and astute. Her new book, The Artist of Disappearance, consists of three substantial short stories, not quite novellas, perhaps, but strong enough to stand alongside the best. This beautiful little book arrives with minimum fanfare, but within a couple of sentences it is obvious that this is storytelling best described as masterful.
“We had driven for never-ending miles along what seemed to be more mudbank than a road between fields of virulent green – jute? rice? What was it that this benighted hinterland produced? I ought to have known, but my head was pounded into too much of a daze by the heat and the sun.”
It does have a feel of Tolstoy, and could well be Russia, but the weary narrator is driving across India on his official way to examine an unofficial museum. There he makes several discoveries. Among the many strengths of Desai's closely observed fiction is her creation of narrators who often balance their doubts with a finely honed exasperation. The best of the contemporary Indian writers, such as Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Rohinton Mistry, Jaspreet Singh or an earlier master, RK Narayan, use language with elegance and efficiency. They also convey a curiously European tone in works that are deeply rooted in the Indian culture and is as international as is all great art. There is also the humour. Desai demonstrated exactly how witty she can be in Fasting, Feasting(1999), which earned her a third Booker shortlisting, following Clear Light of Day(1980) and In Custody(1984).
Ironically, it was her daughter, Kiran, who was to win the prize in 2006, with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. It was dedicated to Anita Desai.
For anyone who has yet to read Desai, this volume is an ideal introduction. The opening story, The Museum of Final Journeys, is excellent, as is the title story, an extraordinary study of solitude as the surest means to survival. Yet Desai, author of so many good books and stories, may well have written her best work to date with Translator, Translated.
In it she considers an ongoing literary debate: translation. Although the role of the translator has in recent years begun to receive the gratitude of the reading public, there remains a lobby of readers who prefer not to read books in translation because of a fear that the tone and nuance of the original often become lost in the process.
Desai introduces the story by way of a discreet digression: “The two women had not met since they were at school together. And at that time they barely had anything to do with each other.” It is clear that one of them was a high achiever, adored, envied and never forgotten, while the other “stands out neither by her looks nor her brains and whom others later have a hard time remembering as having been present at all”.
So Desai introduces Tara, the girl who always excelled at everything and whose postschool career was expectedly dazzling, while Prema, “now middle-aged, even prematurely aged one might say, found herself in the presence of someone she had admired for so long from afar”.
Tara is a famous journalist who branched out into publishing and established a feminist press, whereas Prema is yet another teacher of English literature. Desai underlines the emphasis placed in India on 19th-century British female novelists over Indian authors writing in the various regional languages.
By a strange sequence of events Prema’s loneliness had led her to discover a woman who writes in the native dialect Prema’s dead mother spoke, the language she also knew as a child. She suggests translating this work for Tara’s new imprint. Suddenly it seems that a smudged paperback might secure Prema a new career as a literary translator.
“When she got home on the bus and climbed the stairs . . . the day was sinking into its murky nicotine-tinged haze of dust with home-going traffic pouring through it like blue-black oil from a leak in the street below. The crows that spent the day swinging on the electric and telephone wires and squabbling were dropping into the scraggly branches of the lopped tree below with exhausted squawks. Would she allow herself to be dragged into the gloom by it all once again?”
Prema joins the ranks of the vividly evoked little people who populate literature, from Leopold Bloom to the disgruntled Gordon Comstock, bookseller's assistant in George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Desai moves between the first and third person. Prema delights in the new-found power of being a translator, working as a team with the writer whose work she is easing into English. She is no longer a teacher; she too is an artist. “I tried to distract myself with these sights of the ordinary world, but in my mind it was the lines I had been translating and the lines that I had been writing that remained in the forefront.”
It all goes almost right before then going very badly indeed. It is a wonderful story, balancing irony and pathos.
Publishing is a lottery often decided by hype. Desai is too subtle, too perceptive to generate a buzz. But anyone looking for the rare frisson at the heart of consummate storytelling need look no farther.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
