Anita Desai: Diamond Dust

By JENNY JONES*

Anita Desai's collection of nine stories set in India, Canada and England offers her many followers another rich reading experience full of subtle insights into the human psyche. Those new to her writing are presented with a master.

Desai has the skill to make each new world alive and immediate. The daughter of a Bengali businessman and a German mother, she began writing in English at the age of 7. Her ease with its rhythms enables the Western reader to feel at home even in her most exotic settings and her evocative but methodical unfolding of her characters' sadness or confusion allows the reader to empathise without risk of sentimentality.

In these stories of deeply entwined lives and unusual relationships, past events exercise undue power over present emotions. Characters live on the edge: a man obsessed with his dog, a man unable to recover from the loss of his wife to cancer, a man who sees himself drown, then feels impelled to accept his death and try to find a new life.

Desai is deliberately sparing with information about the geographical settings for her stories though generous with details of place. Of her novels she has written, " ... they are no reflection of Indian society, politics or character. They are part of my private attempt to seize upon the raw material of life."

Desai covers large periods of time in people's lives. Mostly she does this with seamless skill, except for Underground where I found the layered revelations of the old man's past thinned the sense of story. In Winterscape and Royalty there is a palpable sense of time passing slowly for characters imprisoned by need and confusion.

And always, not far away, lurks comedy. One moment the mood is one of sadness or longing, the next we cannot help smiling at the endearing revelation of a very human weakness.

Occasionally I found Desai's love of mystery confusing, never more so than in the opening story, Royalty. Starved of hard fact, I filled in Raja as the gay, estranged son of Ravi and Sarla; he turned out to be a friend from a shared past.

But this is one of the most subtle stories. The title story, Diamond Dust, though entertaining and poignant, is ultimately less satisfying.

Desai's raw material offers glimpses of the uncompromising tragedies and disappointments of life and how the human spirit reacts: sometimes in triumph, sometimes not.

Seize upon it with her.

Vintage

$26.95

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.