Anita Desai: The Novelist by MADHUSUDAN PRASADJournal of South Asian Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1, MISCELLANY (Winter, Spring 1984), pp.216-217Published by: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40872666 .

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decline of Hinduism. Although one would not argue with Naipaul's assertion that Gandhians today have withdrawn into the sanctity of their private re- ligious selves, one cannot help but feel that Naipaul's observations about Gandhi and Gandhianism stem from his rather limited, by his own admission, grasp of Hindu religiosity. Obviously, this limitation is also responsible for his characterization of the Indian ego as "underdeveloped"--a conse- quence, in Naipaul's view, of the rigid social organization of Indian life. The concluding chapter of Rai's study is, thus, devoted to probing this and other reductionist views of Naipaul ; she accomplishes this task mainly by borrowing support from other critics.

As a modest attempt at critical analysis, Sudha Rai's study is not without merit. By exploring the genesis of Naipaul's sensibility toward India, she enhances our understanding of Naipaul the novelist. Although the book makes an excessive use of directly quoted passages from Naipaul's works, and its reliance upon secondary sources is quite heavy, Rai has still contrib- uted to a timely need in Naipaul scholarship-an urge to take Naipaul's non- fiction as seriously as his fiction. However, the presence of numerous errors of style and mechanics--perhaps mostly misprints--is indeed exasper- ating at times. A carefully revised version should be welcome to Naipaul readers .

MADHUSUDAN PRASAD, Anita Desai: The Novelist. Allahabad, India: New Hori- zons, 1981, 148 pp., Rs. 60.00.

Anita Desai' s six novels published so far have clearly secured her a distinguished place among Indian writers writing in English. Her uniqueness, according to Madhusudan Prasad, lies in her addition to Indo-English fiction of an existentialist dimension, a lyrical splendor, and a technical richness "that were hitherto lacking." Indeed, her existentialism is the raison d'être of this critical study of Anita Desai' s novels. In six chapters-- each devoted to a detailed analysis of a novel --Prasad reiterates his argu- ment only to conclude, in the final "Summing-Up," that essentially Desai is a novelist of existentialist concerns, if by existential one means, with F. H. Heinemann, "the enduring human condi tion"--a definition to be noted, one must say, for its incl usiveness.

A casual survey of the subjects and themes depicted in Desai 's novels can easily support Prasad1 s contention. Her novels without exception re- count the existential concerns of life that breeds frustration, emptiness, disillusionment, meaninglessness , degradation, and suffering. Her fictional world is inhabited by men and women whose daily lives confront "the terror of facing single-handed, the ferocious assaults of existence," to repeat Desai quoting Ortega y Gasset. Among her major characters are those who drift from one crisis of loneliness and alienation to another, meeting at each step the Sisyphian despair which often crushes their total beings. Others who opt out of the "absurd" universe find their escapades equally marred by their subconscious or submerged feelings of boredom, guilt, and self-torment. Thus, their acceptance or rejection of the "absurdities" of life leads them to the same nightmarish end in most of Desai' s novels.

Even the topography in her novels reveals her existentialist concerns. Prasad' s discussion clearly shows how her favorite setting, the metropolis, presents the grimi ness and sordidness, oppressive heat and disgusting ugli- ness, of Calcutta with the same minuteness as the suffocating, dismal, foggy gloom of London. Indeed, in the Kafkaesque atmosphere of her novels, her characters wander as prisoners in a dark labyrinth of a prison or a vast, frozen wasteland. What interests their creator about their environment is its effect on their psyche, which is an area of her perennial explorations and, hence, the substance of her stories.

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Prasad's critical approach is clearly formal istic. Recognizing at the outset of his study Desai's esthetic concern for structuralism in the novel as an art form, he focuses his interpretations on the text and structure of each novel. His readings are often penetrating and succeed in bringing out the essential meanings and significance of the situation. Since Desai's novels rely more on characters than events, Prasad devotes considerable at- tention and space to probing the depths and intricacies of the characters' lives--the crucial battles of a character with his alter-ego; the temperamen- tal schism between a husband and a wife; the unbridgeable gap between a father and his son. The outcome is a valuable aid to the reader's under- standing of the novel.

If there is one area in which Prasad treads rather slippery grounds, it is the matter of artistic and thematic influences on a writer by his or her predecessors. Some of his repeated assertions meant to show the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, etc. on the novels of Anita Desai are either undocumented or simply cryptic. Thus, for instance, Prasad argues that Desai is "decidedly deeply influenced by E. M. Forster" because she borrows Forster' s phrase "only connect" in her novel Where Shall We Go This Summer?. Besides, the fact that D. H. Lawrence used "mother fixation" in Sons and Lovers does not automatically make Desai "in- fluenced" by Lawrence just because she also used the same motif in Voices in the City. Similarly, using stream-of-consciousness as a technique of charac- ter development does not necessarily mean to be "influenced" by Virginia Woolf. This is not to argue, however, that Desai's novels are entirely with- out influence of her peers or predecessors--be it in the lyrical quality of her prose or the color imagery used in her descriptions.

Above all, one cannot help but feel that at times Prasad seems to be compelled by his thesis to yoke all of Desai's novels and most of her charac- ters into the harness of existentialism. One case in point is his argument that "the verses by C. P. Cavafy and D. H. Lawrence cited in the novel au- thenticate the existentialist dimension of her [Sita in Where Shall We Go This Summer?] character" (p. 68). Likewise, one wonders what makes Adit's decision to return to India (having been disillusioned with his initial Anglophilia, in Bye-Bye Blackbird) an "irrevocable existential decision?" If he, "like an existentialist," awakes to the absurdity of his life and his world, he must also find his decision equally abscird--which Adit certainly does not.

Indeed, this weakness of Prasad's critical premise lies in its inade- quate formulation. The two paragraphs at the beginning of Chapter One can hardly be expected to set the stage for applying such a broad and complex philosophy as existentialism to literature. His ambivalence toward the existentialist philosophy betrays itself in his conclusion to Where Shall We Go This Summer? where he states that this novel "provides us proudly with a panacea for an endemic existentialist predicament, threatening to assume epidemic proportions in our country" (p. 77). Needless to say, such view is self-explanatory.

Yet, Anita Desai: The Novelist is a useful addition to the growing body of critical appraisal of an active writer whose contribution to literature cannot yet be definitively assessed. Although one finds it hard to reconcile the author's pronouncement on Anita Desai as "indisputably the most powerful novelist ... of all the contemporary Indian-English novelists" with his repeated apologies for the "lack of originality" in her themes, one would welcome his maiden attempt at criticism as the work of a promising critic.

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