The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

Author:Anita Desai [Desai, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780547577456
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The chapters of the promised novel began to come in during the course of that summer, in large Manila envelopes that were always torn around the edges and had to be held together with string. They looked as if they had travelled a long and dusty road and suffered many misadventures along the way—and they probably had. At first I fell upon them as soon as I returned from work and found them lying upon the doormat, then immediately settled down to read them. But quite soon I found myself disappointed and dismayed by what I read.

Instead of the artless charm and the liveliness of the short stories, the novel seemed by contrast slow, almost sluggish, as it followed the fortunes of one family from grandparents to parents to children in a not very interesting town—in fact, very like the dusty, ramshackle one where I had first come across Suvarna Devi's work. I found myself growing increasingly impatient with the noble, suffering grandparents, the quarrelling parents, the drifting children, all of whom seemed to follow predictable paths under the effects of changing circumstances: an increase in wealth followed by a dispersal of property, higher education foundering in lost opportunities—and too many births, marriages and deaths. Stories recounted, time and time again, in different ways, all over the world.

Perhaps Suvarna Devi did not read very much herself, and was unaware of that? Or had her work actually deteriorated? Where was the passion and the drama of those early stories? Where was that keen observation that had given them their authenticity?

Instead of the ardent admiration I had felt once for the author, the excited joy with which I had set to work rendering my childhood language as faithfully as possible into English, I now looked on Suvarna Devi's work with a much colder eye. More professional perhaps.

I began to wonder if publishing such a disappointing novel would be good for Suvarna Devi's reputation, which I had worked hard to establish. And what would it do to my newly created career as a translator? That too had to be considered, did it not? Having linked myself to the author, didn't it require the best from both of us? And what about the reputation of Tara's press and this imprint she had introduced with Suvarna Devi's short story collection as its first publication? All these factors had to be considered.

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