Anita Desai - Fasting, Feasting

Anita Desai's new book, hailed as "unsparing, yet tender and funny,"* brilliantly confirms her place among today's foremost Indian writers. FASTING, FEASTING takes on Desai's greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family. Published in Britain to rave reviews, FASTING, FEASTING is "rich in the sensuous atmosphere, elegiac pathos, and bleak comedy at which the author excels" (The Spectator). From the overpowering warmth of Indian culture to the cool center of the American family, it captures the physical -- and emotional -- fasting and feasting that define two distinct cultures. *(Times Literary Supplement)

Key Information
Authors		Anita Desai
Fiction Genre		Family & Relationships • Fiction
Fiction Subgenre		Conflicts & Dualities • Family & Friendship • Siblings • General • Literary Genres & Types Of Novels • Stages Of Life • Types Of Characters
Awards		1999 The Man Booker Prize
Professional Reviews
Professional Reviews		New York Review of Books: "If FASTING, FEASTING seems not to belong to today's postcolonial, postmodernist Indo-Anglian mainstream, that is precisely because Desai occupies herself with ignored and forgotten people, unrepresentative types, people left behind by history. FASTING, FEASTING may not be her most ambitious novel, but it is an honorable addition to an important body of work.", Salon: "Anita Desai is a wonderfully subtle writer who achieves her powerful and poignant effects by stealth rather than by direct action....FASTING, FEASTING...tells the apparently spare story of one Indian family and the varying fates of its two daughters and single son; it is only on the novel's final, quiet page that Desai's intricate structure becomes clear and the complexity of her emotional insight makes itself felt....FASTING, FEASTING is a novel not of plot but of comparison. In beautifully detailed prose Desai draws the foods and textures of an Indian small town and of an American suburb.", San Francisco Chronicle Book Review: "Providing insight but not answers, Desai handles the complexities of family dynamics with a unique blend of grace, wit and irony....FASTING, FEASTING...sings with simple but elegant prose. Unlike Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai does not heap her pages with fantastical metaphors or put her characters through magical trials. Even the most lyrical passages, as when Uma imagines those who have found the freedom she craves, are grounded in the sadness of reality....Throughout the novel, Desai uses great subtlety and humor to tell her tale, always reminding us of the ironies inherent in love that stifles and escape routes that lead nowhere.", Prose, Francine, New York Times Book Review: "[A] wry, touching and understated novel....As in her previous novels, Desai employs a rich and subtle palette to convey her crisp, unsentimental view of character and behavior. FASTING, FEASTING makes the apparently exotic destinies of Uma, Arun and their family seem as universal, as vital and familiar, as the food on our plates."
Book Editions
Book Editions		Paperback227January 03, 2000Mariner Books8.5"(h) x 5"(w) x 0.25"(d), 0.5 lbs.9780618065820