Fasting, Feasting - Hardcover

Desai, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701168943 ISBN 13: 9780701168940

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

A wonderful novel in two parts, which moves from the heart of a close-knit Indian household, with its restrictions and prejudices, its noisy warmth and sensual appreciation of food, to the cool centre of an American family, with its freedom and strangely self-denying attitude to eating. In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. Or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Through her eyes her Indian family is conjured up - the difficult, demanding but essentially good-hearted parents, her pretty, clever younger sister, and her brother, Arun, the apple of his parent's eye, as well as an extended family of mad uncles and sad cousins. Despite her disappointments it is Uma, who by staying at the cehntre of family life comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, like her sister's, or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. Across the world, in America, where young Arun goes as a student, life in the suburbs - where the man char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terrifying to the young Indian far from home. . . (1998-12-07)

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0701168943
• ISBN 13: 9780701168940
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240