Book review: ‘The Artist of Disappearance’ by Anita Desai

The Artist of Disappearance

Three Novellas

Anita Desai

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 156 pp., $23

In changing India, where deep-rooted tradition meets the great, cruel engine of unbridled capitalism, stories of loss, beauty and hurt abound. Anita Desai mines this territory artfully, again and again, in her new collection of three novellas, “The Artist of Disappearance.”

In Desai’s India, mansions crumble to ruin in lush hinterlands and forests are despoiled. A bright, new country rises in Mumbai and Kolkata, but the fraught social relations of rural and colonial India endure.

“I had acquired this habitual manner of speech to those in an inferior position — servants, petitioners, supplicants,” says the protagonist of “The Museum of Final Journeys,” the first novella, in which a magistrate is assigned to a sleepy backwater post. “I found it was expected of me.”

The magistrate is a young man from the big city, and he’s bored and mildly disgusted with his new surroundings. He’s taken the job only to please his careerist father. Then a humble petitioner arrives. Soon, he’s immersed in one family’s story of loss. He travels to their decaying, largely abandoned estate and finds something akin to the storerooms of Kublai Khan. There are rugs “in the splendid colours of royalty — plum, wine, mulberry and pomegranate” and treasures from Moghul India, Persia and Rajasthan, and many more places.

This is the kind of imagery that writers of fiction set in non-European countries often insert rather cavalierly into their work — the book market demands and expects such decoration. But Desai is a careful, thoughtful writer, and in these novellas the exotic is just one more tool employed in the service of a more meaningful literary project.

The novellas in “The Artist of Disappearance” are parables about the emotional cost of isolation and leaving home. And when the first one ends, the opening of a box and the examining of its contents reveal the loss endured by the estranged son who sent it.

A way of life is passing in India, slowly, inexorably. And yet the traditional, the rural and the provincial endure in the minds of the people living through all this change.

The protagonist of the second novella, “Translator Translated,” has roots in Orissa, in eastern India. Prema Joshi is a woman of humble origins who’s become university educated; alone among the English faculty at her third-tier women’s college, she values the language of her childhood, Oriya, the most widely spoken language of Orissa. Eventually, she champions the work of a little-known fiction writer in that language.

“Why, what had made her pursue such an unpromising course of study?” her colleagues wonder. “What good was this provincial author in a provincial language to her or to anyone here?”

An encounter with an old college classmate sets Prema off on a new project: translating that Oriya writer into English. The Oriya are an unassuming people slowly being assimilated into English-speaking life, and that book is a symbol of the strength and value of their culture. Prema, a lonely woman with few friends, throws herself passionately into her work.

The Oriya writer, as luck would have it, is also a bit of a recluse and uncertain whether she even cares if her work is translated. When she writes a second book, at Prema’s urging, the prose is flat, the story uninspired. So Prema takes liberties with the translation. “What a difference it made when I turned ‘red’ to ‘crimson,’ ‘anger’ to ‘rage,’” Prema says. “My pen began to fly.”

She dispenses with entire passages of the original, and a more powerful book emerges in English. Of course there are prices to pay for such transgressions. And by the end of this second novella — my own favorite of the collection — the reader is left in the kind of ambivalent, illuminated state that all great fiction seeks to produce.

The third novella, which gives the book its title, is just as ambitious in its goals and sweep. It’s the story of a young man, Ravi, adopted by a well-off family. His adoptive parents are cruel, however, and he eventually eschews the professional life they plan for him.

Instead, he chooses the enchantments of a life of solitude among the unspoiled lands on the foothills of the Himalayas — a place under the looming threat of capitalist development. Desai writes of Ravi’s explorations of a single pond: “He felt it could take an entire life to study the strange, extraordinary life that teemed in it — minute, multifarious and totally unlike any earthbound equivalent.”

The same could be said of the India that Desai explores with such heart in this collection. It’s a minute, multifarious world, totally unlike any other.

Tobar is a Times columnist and the author, most recently, of the novel “The Barbarian Nurseries.”

hector.tobar@latimes.com