Anita Desai

Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar (born 24 June 1937), is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of her daughters, Kiran Desai, is also a writer.

Quotes

• Although she had fled the blood-spattered scene and fled the collected crowd of identical individuals — one-legged, nosepicking, vigilant-eyed — and hurried down the street at a speed uncommon for her, a speed no one would have thought possible on those high red heels that were no longer firm but wobbled drunkenly under the weight of her thick, purpleveined legs, Lotte slowed as she neared her door. Her body seemed to thicken and clot, her actions slowed till she was nearly at a standstill. She opened the door with fumbling, ineffective movements as though she had forgotten its grammat, her fingers numb, tongue-tied as it were. Entering the room, she shut the door behind her heavily, taking great care with the locks and bolts and chains, afraid the crowd might follow her, may even now be approaching her room, preparing to shoulder its way into it. When every lock was in place, she leant against the door in the theatrical manner that came naturally to her — pressing a packet of letters to her breast as years ago she had pressed a flower against a bosom still plump and warm, flounced with white lace and spotted with red spots, singing all the while to the stage-lights, her mouth open, a tunnel of red from which might issue either a trill or a howl. Pressing the bits of paper to her now shrunken and flabby bosom, she breathed long harsh breaths that rasped her throat.
  • beginning of the novel Baumgartner's Bombay (1988)

• Her first day in Bombay wilted her. If she stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel room, she drooped, her head hung, her eyes glazed, she felt faint. Once she was back in it, she fell across her bed as though she had been struck by calamity, was extinguished, and could barely bring herself to believe that she had, after all, survived. Sweating, it seemed to her that life, energy, hope were all seeping out of her, flowing down a drain, gurgling ironically.
  • beginning of "Scholar and Gypsy" in Games at Twilight (1978)

Clear Light Of Day (1980)

• "Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood? There are these long still stretches - nothing happens - each day is exactly like the other - plodding, uneventful - and then suddenly there is a crash - mighty deeds take place - momentous events - even if one doesn’t know it at the time - and then life subsides again into the backwaters till the next push, the next flood? That summer was certainly one of them - the summer of '47-"(I, p.42)

• That was the way life was: it lay so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it, to stroke it. Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping. The flames leapt up all around, rising by inches every minute, rising in rings. (II, p78)

• She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived. (III, p110)

• ...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. (IV, p.159)

from interviews/conversations

• I do not recognise India of the present time where, under the banner of 'Hindutva,' intimidation and bigotry seek to silence writers, scholars and all who believe in secular and rational thought. (2015)

• India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country. (Baruch College Class Interview, 2003)

• I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth. (Baruch College Class Interview, 2003)

• My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly. (Baruch College Class Interview, 2003)

• (Would you get very angry if someone said you were the Virginia Woolf of India and you "mothered" the psychological novel in India?) Desai: No, I would be denying something which is fairly obvious. One is the influence of Virginia Woolf upon my own work, and the other is that there weren't very many women writers in India at that time writing psychological novels. (Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 1992)

• When Salman Rushdie published Midnight's Children, it seemed to set tongues free in India in an odd way. Suddenly, younger writers realized that they didn't need to write correct and perfect English in the English tradition, but they could use Indian English and use it for any purpose whatsoever - for writing comic books, satiric books, or even for writing serious books. (Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 1992)

• I think everything one reads tends to linger on in one's writing, even after one's forgotten the book one's read. (The Massachusetts Review, 1988)

• A lament, a protest, a statement. Those have to be made. I suppose that is what we write for. The human animal certainly has a need to make his statement, to retrieve something from the wreck of time. (The Massachusetts Review, 1988)

in The Guardian (2011)

• It is a great influence on one's thoughts to be always on the outside, not belonging.

• ...why am I constantly writing about the past? Well, I probably couldn't approach the present directly, because I was carrying all of this past with me.

• It is astonishing that now a whole generation has grown up reading Indian literature in English. Nothing was being read when I was a student. We read no Indian writers at all.

• So often one's writing is prophetic. When you write, you are in touch with another force, not the everyday force you employ, you retreat so deep into yourself, you don't suspect those feelings had been there.

• I still like to read poetry before starting my work. Rilke, Cavafy, Mandelstam, Brodsky...Poets go directly to what they want to get across – they don't amble around, they cut to it with a tremendous immediacy that affects one.

• I definitely had a feeling, writing In Custody and Baumgartner's Bombay, of opening the door and stepping out into the street, walking, seeing, experiencing other places, other lives. If I'd lived my whole life in Old Delhi, I would feel so much frustration and anger that my world should be so limited by my very narrow experience. I wouldn't have wanted it otherwise. Was it wonderful? That is a different question. It was both wonderful and difficult.

• (KD Do you find a pattern in your work when you look at it all together?) AD …Perhaps that line by Emily Dickinson sums everything up: "Memory is a strange bell – jubilee and knell." I suppose that's been ringing away in my head all these years. That is why I feel so alienated from the India of today, because it has so separated itself from the India of the past. (KD With deliberate effort?) AD Tearing itself, to destroy the past, to be rid of it.

Quotes about Anita Desai

• Anita Desai and Jean Rhys, who over the years became favorite, influential writers.
  • Leila Aboulela interview quoted here

• Anita Desai packs worlds into pages, but keeps her eye close to the private, painful, funny humanity of her characters.
  • Louise Erdrich, used as blurb for The Zigzag Way

• I don’t know of any writer who has responded so ardently — mystically — to that magical scenery and then got it down with such poetic exactitude.
  • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, about Fire on the Mountain, used as blurb for Clear Light of Day

• Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture.
  • Alison Lurie, used as blurb for Diamond Dust and Other Stories

• She makes the apparently exotic . . . seem as universal, as vital and familiar, as the food on our plates.
  • Francine Prose, used as blurb for The Zigzag Way

External links

Encyclopedic article on Anita Desai on Wikipedia