Volume 43, Number 9 · May 23, 1996
Mystically Yours
By Pico Iyer
Journey to Ithaca
by Anita Desai
Knopf, 320 pp., $23.00
If anyone could take a measured and penetrating view of the nuances of the guru scene in India and elsewhere—those affairs of the heart that can seem a form of spiritual imperialism—it would surely be Anita Desai. Not only because she grew up in Delhi as partly an outsider and so, she has said, can see the land of her birth through her mother's German eyes, while feeling it with her father's Bengali heart. But even more because she is a connoisseur of illusion and imprisonment—those hopes with which people entangle themselves—and if her novels have often been about the mortality of the seemingly dignified, they are no less about the struggle for dignity in the face of that mortality. Nearly all of her main characters are dreamers or poets or hopeful young men, often in flight but on a quest for a more elevated life (in art, in music, in language—the elegant old court language of Urdu), even as the traffic outside brings them rudely back to earth.
Review, 4798 words
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