Fasting, Feasting - Softcover

Desai, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099289636 ISBN 13: 9780099289630

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America.

Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.

About this title

Review:

Anita Desai, through her short stories and novels, two of which, Clear Light of Day and In Custody, have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is one of the most accomplished and admired chroniclers of middle-class India. In this, her latest novel, she tells the story of plain and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, daughter and son of strict and conventional parents--"MamaPapa" in Uma's mind, so united are they in their unyielding views and dictums. Desai perfectly matches form and content: details are few, the focus narrow, emotions and needs given no place. Uma, as daughter and woman, expects nothing; Arun, as son and male, is lost under the weight of expectation.

Now in her forties, Uma is at home. Attempts at arranged marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, she is at the beck and call of MamaPapa, with only her collection of bangles and old Christmas cards for consolation.

Arun, at university in Massachusetts, is having to spend the summer with the Patton family in the suburbs: their fridge and freezer full of meat that no one eats, and Mrs Patton desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun most wants is to be ignored, invisible.

The novel's counterpointing of India and America is a little forced, whereas Desai's focus on the daily round, whether in the Gangetic plain or suburban America, finely delineates the unspoken dramas in both cultures. And her characters, emblematic in their suffering. but capable of their own small rebellions, give Fasting, Feasting its sharp bite. --Ruth Petrie

Review:

"Desai has a wicked, subtle humour...and her characters are beautifully described... Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays" (Daily Telegraph)

"Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy's inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive... Fasting, Feasting is a hypnotically readable story, in language which has the precision of poetry...an ambitious, successful and disturbing novel" (The Times)

"A compelling, mature work by India's finest writer in English" (Independent)

"A quiet, low-key novel, notable for its vignettes...[which] are so sharp, so rich in detail, that the book packs a real polemic punch...Fasting Feasting is a fine showcase for the delicate, distinctive skills of Anita Desai" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Desai is more than smart; she's an undeniable genius." (Washington Post)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099289636
• ISBN 13: 9780099289630
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240