Journey to Ithaca

Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Vintage / Random House India
ISBN-13: 9788184000771
ISBN-10:8184000774
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 400 Pages
Copy courtesy: Publisher
Rating: 3.5/5

Now she knows why the Mother went on that pilgrimage, why anyone goes on a pilgrimage, and why she must go too.

Journey to Ithaca by Anita Desai is about poignant pilgrimages of the protagonists, painted with so much beauty and pathos, it takes you on one of your own. Desai does that. She is masterful in carrying a reader in her arms to surreal places, in unforgettable realms. I shall always remember the time I read my first Desai novel, The Artist of Disappearance. I shall always remember how she took my breath away with almost every sentence. She weaves similar her magic in Journey to Ithaca, but in certain places, in certain ways. It is not a sustained work of genius like The Artist... is. I remember wanting to cry sometimes, so overwhelmed I was with the beauty of her language.

Like here: Isabel is quiet, separating two ideas and then putting them together again: Grandmother does not want them to go to their parents, and grandmother does not want them here. 'Then where can we go?' she asks, not knowing a third place for themselves. 

And here: ...and a jasmine that flowered and flowered as though it thought itself to be in paradise.

But I also remember being bored at times. Especially the last few pages. Perhaps I was tired of reading the the book, perhaps Desai of tired of writing it. The end of Matteo and Sophie's story and that of Laila or the Mother's and that of Giacomo and Isabel all come to a laboured end, but that's perhaps how it feels when one reaches Ithaca.

Journey to Ithaca takes us along on the arduous road to self discovery of Matteo, his antithetic wife, Sophie, and the spiritual journey of the Mother/Laila. As Mateo tires of his bourgeois Italian upbringing and heads to India with his newly-wedded wife, Sophie in search of life's true purpose, we fall and flail along the path with them. Sophie is disgruntled with the dirt, the disease and the poverty of India and wants to live the 'Goa' life, while Matteo suffers in his search for a guru, until at last he finds refuge in the Mother. Sophie does not understand Matteo's blind faith in the Mother and proceeds to uncover her past in the hope to open her husband's eyes. Sophie learns about the spiritual guru's past as Laila, a rebel, who dances her way to India, and finally meets her spiritual master and destiny.

Desai's portrayal of Matteo and Laila strike home particularly hard because their search for the Supreme is laced with a lot of pain, doubt and conflict. The author is brilliant when she deals with strong emotions such as these. You can feel it sometimes like a body blow, when Matteo lies on the cold hard ground in wait and Laila weeps in agony to be united with her divine lover. Sophie's bewilderment draws sympathy too, but not as much. The characters are stark and the plot sublime. Reading Desai needs you to be buoyant, to float, and to let it take you to Ithaca and beyond.

The Artist of Disappearance

Author: Anita Desai

ISBN: 978 81 8400 155 6

Publisher: Random House India

Copy courtesy: Publisher

Price: INR 350

Pages: 156

I’ve never read an Anita Desai work before. Strangely enough, I don’t recollect having read even one article about her. Either I’ve missed out on it, or the media has never painted any glorious pictures of her. She is not scandalous, Kamala Das-like; she is not glamorous like a Shobha De; nor is she controversial, in the manner of Arundhati Roy. (Or is she?) The Wikipedia page on her is woefully lacking. Apart from the fact that she is a Sahitya Akademi winner, I know nothing. When I started this book, I knew not what to expect. But having finished ‘The Artist of Disappearance’, I want to know who Anita Desai, the person, is. What person writes like this? From whose pen flow words with the terrible beauty of death wishes? But she won’t give in easily. I must perhaps re-read the book, look carefully again between the lines, to understand the source of such enigma.

Yes; ‘enigmatic’ is the word that best describes ‘The Artist of Disappearance’. It is a collection of three novellas – ‘The Museum of Final Journeys’, ‘Translator Translated’ and ‘The Artist of Disappearance’ – stories of strange internal worlds, stories of crumbling, lost people and places. It is as if Anita Desai found the beautiful in the broken, and captured their fall as one would with slow motion photography. You will find it its pages an old IAS officer reminiscing about a an old curator of a forgotten museum, a middle-aged, middle-class teacher on an odyssey of translating a quaint book, and a hermit-artist living in the charred remains of his house, creating strange patterns in nature.

Unhurried – that’s Anita Desai’s writing. Beautiful, slow and sure amidst hoards of books that move so fast, there’s no time to think. I picture this writer, who has emerged from a 7-year literary hiatus with what is probably her last book (God forbid!) with stories about dwindling. She is weaving the emptiness of her own aged world into these pages. Sometimes her lines are labored, with the kind of effort an arthritic person makes when climbing the stairs. But there are so many breathtaking moments too. Especially in those magnified descriptions of nature. There are the kinds of observations people with the luxury of time or the love of nature make. I imagine the 70-something author as having them both. And what exquisite results they yield for the reader.

I don’t know how it is with her other books, but with this one Anita Desai takes time to grow on you. She doesn’t snare, she doesn’t tease, she doesn’t titillate. She grows surreptitiously on you like moss on rocks. Now she isn’t there, now she is. In the first few pages, you don’t know where the story is going or what the point of the story is. In fact, if you are looking for a traditional end, you may not find it even at the end of the story. Because her stories have no end. They are leisurely strolls through forgotten roads of old towns. Embark on ‘The Artist of Disappearance’ only if you can slow down and breathe deep.

Rating: 3.5/5