From Library Journal
Here, Booker Prize finalist Desai (writing, MIT) presents a cultural comparision of two cultures and two siblings. Uma, the eldest daughter of an Indian family, has returned to her childhood home after a failed marriage and is destined to serve as the caretaker for her elderly, cantankerous parents. Arun, the cherished and unexpected son, is studying, a world away, in America and spending the summer with the Pattons, a typical suburban family. Desai divides her narrative into two parts. The first part tells Uma's story - as her parents sabotage her every move for independence. Then, using a subtle irony, Desai moves into the second part, contrasting the sights and sounds of India with Arun's experiences in suburban America. Desai manages to present the sterotypical suburban Patton family with enough humor to make the characters real and the emotions they evoke believable. Recommended for all libraries.
Dianna Moeller, OCLC/WLN Pacific Northwest Svc. Ctr., Lacey, WA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Through the deceptively simple juxtaposition of opposites and the interweaving and repetition of themes in these two narratives, Desai builds a complex and elegant fiction." Boston Globe
"Desai is more than smart; she's an undeniable genius." The Washington Post
"What a pleasure! She is really one of the most accomplished novelists writing today-- the book flows like water, it comes like a gift to the parched. Heart-rending, yes of course, being about how rescue never comes, but so alive in its appreciation of life's consolations as to be quite magical." -- Fay Weldon
"Short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize, Desai's stunning new novel...looks gently but without sentimentality at an Indian family...she has much to say in this graceful, supple novel about the inability of the families in either culture to nurture their children." Publishers Weekly, Starred
"Anita Desai is considered one of the foremost Indian authors writing in English. Her novels convey the tangled complexities of Indian tradition, with an economy of language that is clean, simple and elegantly straightforward." The Denver Post
"It is Desai's great accomplishment to portray the worlds of the brother and sister as not simply opposites (as the title might suggest), but as sharing similar forces of family pressure, parental expectation and sibling rivalry. Desai's characters are wonderfully, fallibly human as they wend their way through the maze of everyday domestic tensions." The San Francisco Chronicle
"Anita Desai is a wonderfully subtle writer who acheives her powerful and poignant effects by stealth rather than direct action." Salon
"Fasting, Feasting posits food as a metaphoer for emotional sustenance. Everything centers around food. Desai, who teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells the story with lapidary prose, creating intimate scenes as detailed as Indian miniature paintings. An accumulation of small det...
About the Author
ANITA DESAI is the author of Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day, and Diamond Dust, among other works. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Desai was born and educated in India and now lives in the New York City area.
