Volume 50, Number 10 · June 12, 2003
Revenge Tragedy
By Anita Desai
The Light of Day
by Graham Swift
Knopf, 324 pp., $24.00
In 1983 a book by the young writer Graham Swift was published in England that caused a stir, even a storm, of interest. Waterland was like a magical island that had risen overnight out of a flat and watery marshland, making one rub one's eyes in disbelief. The story he told was indeed set in that very English landscape, the fens of East Anglia, but the way in which he told it had more to do with the mythical—and steamily tropical—Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, the gray Baltic and bleak Gdansk of Günter Grass, and, going further back in time, the past-haunted Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner. The links were not made when it came out but to reread Waterland now is to have them staring out at you; these writers did not have a geographical territory in common, but they had together created a new literary territory that did in time become vividly recognizable.
Review, 3079 words
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