Restoring the adjective’s good name
Anita Desai’s new story collection employs words to devastating effect
Even though adjectives make up only about six per cent of the English lexicon, they get little respect. See, for example, the website “10 Authors Against Adjectives” or pick up any number of guides on how to write well, which always caution neophyte novelists about the dangers of overusing descriptive or clichéd words (“dark” and “stormy” spring to mind). Stephen King once wrote that the road to hell is paved with adjectives, for heaven’s sake.
But, dear reader, while a surfeit of inapt adjectives is indeed the mark of the rank amateur, we must nevertheless take these proscriptions against them with a grain of salt, for there live among us gifted and artful writers, masters of le mot juste, in whose hands a pitch-perfect and well-placed adjective can be a beautiful thing indeed. Anita Desai is one such writer.
The Artist of Disappearance, Desai’s first book in seven years, is a slight volume containing three stories set in her native India. The stories explore such themes as disappointment (especially of women), illusions, the erosion of traditions and the ravages of time, and each is told in Desai’s effortless, mellifluous, subtle prose, which employs adjectives (and adverbs and verbs, too, for that matter) to devastating effect. In the first story, The Museum of
Final Journeys, a man is sent to a remote village to begin his career as a civil servant. One day an old man arrives to tell him about an astonishing museum assembled by his former employers and left in his charge. The old man can no longer look after the museum, which includes an aged elephant, and he requests the government’s help. The civil servant does not provide it and must live with the consequences.
Desai incisively conveys the woefulness of the village and the civil servant’s unsympathetic presence there by describing his first meal, eaten on a yellow-curry-stained tablecloth under a lone light bulb. Flying ants fall into his stew, where their wings detach themselves from the “small, floundering worms of their bodies.”
Later, in his bare bedroom, he considers it a mercy to turn off the “impudent” light. The second story, Translator Trans
lated, concerns a middle-aged college lecturer named Prema whom we meet at a social function, where her plainness contrasts sharply with the glamour of her old schoolmate, Tara, a dynamo who founded the first feminist press in India. Prema had always secretly admired Tara, so when the latter asks Prema to translate into English a book written in Oriya, the native tongue of Prema’s mother, she is thrilled.
The book is a success, so Tara commissions a translation of another work, with disastrous results. The dazzling Tara’s lock of white hair “gleams like a bold statement” amid her smooth black tresses, acting as a kind of prophetic insult to the drabness of the “prematurely aged” and ill-fated Prema.
The title story, The Artist of Disap--
pearance, is about Ravi, who is adopted as a child by a wealthy couple who leave him alone for months every year when they go to Europe to escape the sweltering Indian summer. Desai sums up Ravi’s parents’ careless self-centredness in one verb — just as they leave for several months, they “remember” to turn around and wave to the little boy.
After the eventual death of both parents, Ravi, now an adult, becomes a hermit in the remote mansion, which a fire has left in almost complete ruins. He occupies himself by constructing a fabulous hidden bower, but his repose is broken one day when a film crew arrives; they’re shooting a documentary about environmental degradation and the dynamiting of the countryside by mining companies. Their accidental discovery of Ravi’s extraordinary garden heralds the arrival of a new and awful world order.
Anita Desai was born in 1937 and grew up in India, the daughter of a German mother and an Indian father. Though fluent in several languages, she chose English as her literary language and published her first book in 1963; 16 more followed over the ensuing five decades. She has won numerous international awards and has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize. Whether as a result of nature or nurture, Desai’s daughter, Kiran, is also a novelist (she bested her mother when, in 2006, her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker). Kiran Desai’s partner is the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, which makes Anita Desai the mother-in-law of a Nobel laureate.
Imagine being a fly, winged or otherwise, hovering around a light bulb and listening to the adjectives soar at one of their dinner parties. The thought defies description.