Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 138
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0099428539
Description
Set in contemporary Bombay and other cities, these stories reflect the kaleidoscope of urban life-evoking the color, sounds and white-hot heat of the city.
Warm, perceptive, humorous and touched with sadness, Anita Desai’s stores are peopled with intensely individual characters- the man spiritually transformed by the surface texture of a melon; the American wife who, homesick for the verdant farmlands of Vermont, turns to the hippie in the Indian hills; the painter living in a slum who fills his canvasses with flowers, birds and landscapes he has never seen.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS
Absolutely first-rate…absorbing
-OBSERVER
Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture
–ALISON LURIE
As finely written atmospheric pieces alone the stories would be memorable-as social documents they are absorbing. The volume’s profound theme is the tension between convention and exploration, family solidarity and individualism… An admirably humane and responsible achievement
-HERMIONE LEE, OBSERVER
Desai has a gift of opening up a closed world and making it clearly visible
-SUNDAY TIMES
Contents
Games at Twilight
Private Tuition by Mr. Bose
Studies in the Park
Surface Textures
Sale
Pineapple Cake
The Accompanist
A Devoted Son
The Farewell Party
Pigeons at Daybreak
Scholar and Gypsy