Perhaps it is the reference to jute in Anita Desai’s latest “The Artist of Disappearance” that inspired the designer of the novel’s cover to use the backdrop of a gunny sack. The burlap gives the cover a tactile, textural feel that would compel someone like me to pick up the book. What adds to that rough hewn look is a slightly open box of purple-tipped matches produced in Kalugumalai in Tamil Nadu. That physical effect is completed with an almost fully consumed matchstick.
You can perhaps tell that I have not read Desai’s book which is now being hailed widely in the Western press as an example of her Chekhovian or Tolstoyan pedigree. Why else would I dwell on the book’s jacket? Until recently, I had never read anything that Anita Desai has written. For that matter, I have not yet read anything that her more celebrated daughter Kiran Desai has written. Hence I have to defer to the opinions of various Western critics who are describing Anita Desai in superlative terms.
“India’s finest writer in English,” declared The Independent of London. “Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy’s inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive,” says The Times.
At different times I have conceded my intellectual inadequacy to fully appreciate Indian writers who draw such unrestrained praise in the West. It is entirely a reflection on my limited capacity to understand great literature. Reading 30 odd pages of Desai’s collection of short stories merely reinforced my low opinion of my literary comprehension. I mostly don’t grasp the writing of this kind other than the inherent imagery in it.
Her first story begins with these lines: “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.”
“The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow.”
I am struck by the image of the sun setting into a “sullen murk of ashes and embers” because it is so cinematic. It is the same sensibility that draws me to the cover of the book. It is doubtful whether I would go much beyond the cover.
