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The Artist Of Disappearance (2011)

by Anita Desai(Favorite Author)

3.35 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0547577451 (ISBN13: 9780547577456)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: I've been wanting to try out Anita Desai for a while, and thought these short works would be a good place to start. Reviews quoted on the jacket say Desai is "an undeniable genius" and "one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture." I can't disagree, but having read the first two novellas, I don't want to read the third. In both of the ones I've read, the protagonist is unlikeable, and at the end, it turns out that nothing ever really came of everything that happened in the story. I guess this is an interesting reversal of the convention in fiction writing of treating the events in a story as if they matter. But it leaves me unmotivated to read another story.
review 2: The three stories in "The A... morertist of Disappearance" have no "real" story, unless you look at them from a deeper level, and that is where Anita Desai's exquisitely descriptive style really shines: at leaving one in a time and place and letting him connect the dots to reveal the underlying story. Yet, at times, she omits more than is necessary and fails to strike a clear balance between "showing" and "telling", leaving the reader baffled about the point of her stories (as with the first one, "The Museum of Final Journeys") "Translator Translated," a look at how a translated work is really an insight into the psyches of both author and translator, is by far the best of the lot, while the eponymous "The Artist of Disappearance" is more average and fails to evoke emotions where it should. On the whole, it's an above-average read, although Desai's subtlety may be lost on many, making it much worse for them. less

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