Since last writing about books here I've had some interesting conversations with our daughter about book dust-jackets. What are they for? why are they called 'dust-jackets'? Can she go round the house to collect all of the ones we took off her books to stop them from tearing when she was a bit rougher with her books, and look at them?
There is something about the dust jacket on a hardback book that is both appealing and something of a nuisance. Do others taken them off temporarily? But as I was about to say, The Artist of Disappearance (2011) is a collection of three novellas by Anita Desai who happens to be the mother of Kiran Desai (whose own book, The Inheritance of Loss, I still have not read). I circled around this little red hardback book with a dust jacket in February in the Hobart Book Shop http://www.hobartbookshop.com.au/ off Salamanca Place. It was on the new books table. I kept going back, feeling like buying any new book at that stage was an indulgence. But I'd recently passed a Sebastian Faulks book unfinished to my friend Julia, as halfway through I just decided I could not keep believing in the posturing of the writing or the people Faulks was writing about. I wonder if she read it? And I'd had some joy in reading a small, hardback copy of Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Perhaps, I thought, this little red book will be the one! I was alone, you see, and waiting for CH and our daughter to join me. I knew people but was trying to write and digest research. I was staying in an apartment and needed books, as the evenings were pretty much solitude, as I sometimes like it.
The Artist of Disappearance is a sharp, poignant, exacting selection of Desai's writing. The first novella, 'The Museum of Final Journeys', is terrific. An Indian civil servant is approached by villagers wanting to know what to do with a huge collection of international artefacts made by a man who had since died, and among the items collected was a live elephant. In 40 pages Desai examines the mood, motivations and passions of a passionless man and the final outcome of his journey is both sad and ridiculous. This story made me think, and I had to savour it so as not to read the rest of the book too quickly (one of my bad habits is to read too fast). The second, longer story, 'Translator Translated', is again a very perceptive piece of writing about a person who takes liberties and is reckless but this covers up a huge lack of confidence and a kind of anger at not being recognised by the world. A woman begins to translate the writing of an indigenous writer unknown to a wider audience but finds the writing so spare and dull that she embellishes it for the English audience, blurring the lines between the original and her own writing, and leaving everyone in doubt as to her integrity. She is quite a frustrating character but the story is both intriguing and sort of funny, except that it is is not. I know this probably does not make sense but I do not want to give it all away in telling plots! In the final story, with the same title as the collection, some young explorers expose a secret and yet do not uncover its deep past. Very curious piece, but I liked it very much. This collection is one I shall re-read.
I've been looking everywhere in secondhand stores for earlier Desai books. I've found one that I started reading but discarded, a novel called Baumgartner's Bombay, which was quite good but which I simply lost interest in. It turns out our university library has quite a bit of Desai in its collection so that's one way I'll try more of her work. Watch out for posts on the wonderful world of libraries, adventures in libraries, and more.
A note on dates - Blogger seems to calculate my writing days as being in the Northern Hemisphere. I must get more Blogger literate and fix that!
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