Culture

Anita Desai Has Put Down Roots, but Her Work Ranges Widely

Published

1 day ago

January 6, 2025

Anita Desai Has Put Down Roots, but Her Work Ranges Widely

Anita Desai has lived in Delhi and London and Boston, but when she settled, she chose the Hudson River Valley, in New York State. She first came 40 years ago, to visit the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and was so impressed that she later made her home here, on one of the most dramatic stretches of the river.

“I discovered what a beautiful part of America this is,” recalled Desai, 87, sitting in her house in Cold Spring, her living room awash in sunlight and her walls lined with books.

The journey to this point has been long and winding for Desai. For years, she explored a variety of literary and artistic landscapes, from remote Indian ashrams to Mexican mining towns and suburban America, expanding in the process the horizons of generations of Indian writers, both at home and abroad. And now, though she has put down roots in one place, her imagination continues to roam widely.

Her new novella, “Rosarita,” is a slim, enigmatic mystery set in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a ghostly meditation on truth and memory, violence and art. In it, a visiting Indian student stumbles upon traces of her mother’s hidden past as an artist in 1950s Mexico — or is it just a mirage, fed by the “fantasies and falsehoods” of a local stranger?

Salman Rushdie has been a deep admirer of Desai’s work since early books such as “Clear Light of Day” (1980), which he said reminded him of Jane Austen. “Both Anita and Austen present a deceptively quiet and gentle surface to the reader,” Rushdie wrote over email, “beneath which lurks a ferocious intelligence and a sharp, often cutting wit.”

“Rosarita” signals a “new departure for Anita,” he added; with its air of mystery and otherworldliness, it suggests Jorge Luis Borges more than Austen.

A sense of foreignness and dislocation has shadowed Desai from the start. The daughter of a Bengali father and German mother, Desai said she never quite fit in with Indian families when she was growing up in Delhi.

She was 10 when India became independent, and she identified powerfully with the mission of the young country. “We were very proud of belonging to this new, independent India. Being part of this country of Nehru gave one great pride and sense of comfort in those years,” she remembered. “But I outgrew that — well, India outgrew that, too.”

When she began writing in the 1960s, she was influenced by a generation of post-independence authors like R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who was her neighbor at the time, encouraged her literary pursuit. She soon found her material close by.

“That Old Delhi home and life was the one I knew best, the one I wrote about constantly,” Desai said. “After ‘Clear Light of Day,’ I became known as this woman writer who writes about a woman’s position in the family. I did it so often that I saw its limitations, and I wanted to open a door and step out of it.”

The book that opened that door was “In Custody” (1984), an elegy for the rarefied, male world of Urdu poetry that captured “the decline of a language, a literature and a culture,” Kalpana Raina, a Kashmiri-born writer and translator, said over email. It remains one of Desai’s most beloved works, and went on to become a successful Merchant-Ivory film in 1993.

Desai’s work expanded further in the years to come, with a string of novels — “Baumgartner’s Bombay” (1988), “Journey to Ithaca” (1995) and “Fasting, Feasting” (1999) — that featured an assortment of strangers in strange lands.

Desai herself had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s to teach writing at M.I.T. The harsh winters, among other things, were a shock to her system. As the snow piled up that first year, she booked an escape to Oaxaca, in Mexico, never expecting she’d return to the country often over the years.

“Getting to know Mexico opened up another world for me, another life,” she said. “It’s strange because it’s so like India, I feel utterly at home there. And yet there’s something about Mexico that’s surrealistic rather than realistic.”

“Rosarita” — like her 2004 novel “The Zigzag Way” — has been a way for Desai to reimagine Mexico in her fiction. When she came upon the story of the Punjabi artist Satish Gujral, who studied with Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists, she began to envision a narrative that linked the “wounds, mutilations” of two violent historical events: Indian partition, which cleaved the subcontinent along religious lines in 1947, and the Mexican Revolution, a civil war that began in 1910.

Over time, she teased out the fragments of her tale, weaving in a mother-daughter story line as well — “the most familiar part,” she said. It was a mystery even to her, she admitted, where it would all lead. One thing she did know, though, was that it would be a novella, compressed and impressionistic. She had enjoyed writing her collection of novellas, “The Artist of Disappearance,” published in 2011, and the form suited her.

“It doesn’t take the immense energy and stamina that the novel requires,” she said. “You can finish it before it finishes you.”

While Desai claims this may be her last book, she is relishing the experience of watching her daughter Kiran continue the journey. Kiran’s debut, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” appeared in 1998, just after India’s 50th anniversary. Her follow-up, “The Inheritance of Loss” — a masterwork that spanned Harlem and the Himalayas and awed her mother — won the 2006 Booker Prize. Rushdie has called the mother-daughter pair “the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction.”

Kiran is part of an impressive group of Indian novelists who emerged in the globalized 1990s, a far cry from the closed and isolated world her mother knew as a young writer in English decades earlier. “There has, of course, been a huge blossoming since that time and a more seamless connection between India and its diaspora authors,” Kiran explained over email. “I do think it is important to remember that it was lonely writers like my mother who opened the door for subsequent generations.”

Kiran calls her mother’s long writing life a “gift,” and isn’t so sure it’s done yet.

“She was born in British India and lived through such enormous changes,” added Kiran, who often works alongside her mother at her scenic home by the Hudson. “Now she always tells me she isn’t writing, but every time I pass her room I see her at her desk. Her days, at 87, are still entirely made of reading books, reading about books, and writing. It’s as if her whole life has been lived inside the world of art, every experience processed through this lens.”

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Culture

Book Review: ‘How to Sleep at Night,’ by Elizabeth Harris

Published

1 hour ago

January 7, 2025

Press Room

HOW TO SLEEP AT NIGHT, by Elizabeth Harris

The witty opening of Elizabeth Harris’s “How to Sleep at Night” finds Ethan Keller confessing “something terrible” to his husband, Gabe: He wants to run for Congress. Ethan is a Republican, but Gabe is a Democrat, and Ethan says he won’t run if Gabe says no. Wanting to support his husband’s dreams and fearing the resentment a refusal could bring, Gabe agrees.

While Gabe and Ethan’s political rift is the crux of the book, Harris cools the stakes to a conflict between center-left and center-right. Gabe may be a Democrat, but he’s scornful of people he considers too far to the left, calling them “nuts”; in fact, he has tried to bond with Ethan by “poking fun at a clownish devotion to 16-letter acronyms and an eagerness to be offended by everything.”

Ethan explains his beliefs to their 5-year-old daughter privately by saying that Republicans believe change should happen carefully and people should make the decisions about their own lives.

He uses more provocative “woke mob” rhetoric in public, but Harris, a New York Times staff writer who covers book publishing, presents that as a performance that may or may not represent his convictions. Neither husband identifies with what he considers the extremes of his party, although both know their very existence as a gay married couple with a child has political significance.

More important than their divergent beliefs is Gabe and Ethan’s shared attitude about those beliefs, which is that they can be set aside when they don’t affect you directly. Gabe, a high school history teacher, can grit his teeth about Ethan’s growing notoriety until a couple of his students, both gay and one undocumented, start to trust him less in favor of a teacher he can’t stand. And what provokes Gabe’s discomfort most of all is the way people talk on the internet about him and his marriage.

Ethan treats his politics primarily as a vehicle for ambition; Gabe treats his as self-definition. The story seems headed for a confrontation between the two about how people should be treated and how the abstract idea of “politics” intersects with that question — but the confrontation never arrives. Over and over, when they approach the disagreements that seem too serious to ignore, they walk away, go to bed or change the subject.

This forestalling of what feel like inevitable and even necessary fractures can be frustrating and repetitive. But perhaps that’s the point: To make a relationship like this work, you will, over and over, have the same fight that goes nowhere.

The other strand of the novel follows Ethan’s sister, Kate, a print reporter, who reconnects with an old love: Nicole, a stay-at-home mom who’s grown bored with her wealthy, conservative husband. Kate is discombobulated by Nicole’s return and challenged by the thorny ethics of having her newspaper cover her brother’s campaign.

Kate and Nicole’s relationship is much more focused on the personal and less on the public, and it’s a thoughtful tale of people reconnecting in middle age with both the benefit and the baggage of long experience. And again, Kate’s story suggests that these are people for whom personal loyalty is primary. Everything else is negotiable.

Harris’s lively writing and the fast-moving narrative accompany what’s ultimately a bleak view of comfort in difficult times: The way to sleep at night, these characters find, is to secure your own future and make peace in your relationships, and then to think about what’s happening to the rest of the world as little as possible. As Kate muses at one point: “What’s Gabe supposed to do? Does he blow up a pretty excellent daily life for something that feels abstract? I don’t think most people would.”

You can sleep at night, in other words, through just about anything — if you don’t have to sleep alone.

HOW TO SLEEP AT NIGHT | By Elizabeth Harris | Morrow | 304 pp. | $28.99

Culture

Ilona Maher sprinkles her stardust on England – U.S. rugby icon’s new team has had to find a bigger home stadium

Published

9 hours ago

January 7, 2025

Press Room

Ilona Maher sprinkles her stardust on England – U.S. rugby icon’s new team has had to find a bigger home stadium

Asked if she felt tired after spending over an hour posing for pictures with hundreds of fans, Ilona Maher channels Taylor Swift with her answer.

“I do get tired a lot but, as Taylor Swift said, ‘I get tired a lot but I don’t get tired of it’.”

The ‘it’ the 28-year-old rugby union player from Burlington, Vermont is referring to is the fanfare which follows her every move.

Fresh from making her 20-minute debut for Bristol Bears, the English team she has joined on a three-month contract, Maher had to tackle a queue of photo-seekers more than 250 yards long — taking up three sides of the pitch. Some had travelled across the Atlantic from Washington, D.C. to see a player who now transcends her sport. A 2024 Olympic bronze medallist who last year also featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition and was named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, Maher’s fame continues to snowball.

There weren’t any expectations placed on Maher to spend time with what seemed like every fan who attended her Bristol debut, but she did. “I saw the line of people staying out there and I was like, ‘I’m going to try to take as many photos as I can’,” she told reporters.

With eight million-plus followers across Instagram and TikTok combined, Maher is the most-followed rugby player in the world. She took followers behind the scenes at the previous Olympics in Japan in 2021, when fans were barred from attending due to ongoing pandemic-related regulations and has a sense of humour that would not go amiss in some Saturday Night Live sketches. Mix that with a back catalogue of empowering, body-confident video messages, and she has a global audience of supporters, many of whom are young women and girls.

Maher came on as a second-half replacement for Bristol Bears on Sunday (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Over 9,000 were in attendance for Maher’s debut in Bristol, a city in the west of England, just over 100 miles from London, known, among other things, for being the birthplace of street artist Banksy. And just as when one of the anonymous political activist’s latest works pops up to huge publicity, Maher demands the same level of excitement in whatever she does.

Within 72 hours of her move to England being announced, Sunday’s game against local rivals Gloucester-Hartpury was moved from Shaftesbury Park (the 2,000-capacity venue where the team usually play) to Ashton Gate, the 27,000-seater stadium which is home to Bristol City’s men’s and women’s soccer teams, as well as the Bears’ men’s rugby side.

At that point, there was no guarantee Maher, whose every move is being followed by documentary filmmakers from Hello Sunshine (a production company founded by actor Reese Witherspoon that focuses on telling women’s stories), would even feature in the match after she was named as a replacement on the team sheet 48 hours before kick-off. Yet, the team’s attendance record of 4,101, set in 2022, was smashed. For a standalone game in Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR), there has been no bigger crowd.

Rose Kooper-Johnson is a fellow New Englander, from Rhode Island, and has been living in the UK for the past six years. The 29-year-old works at the Bristol-based University of the West of England in student communications and had never watched rugby live before Sunday.

“Hearing she was coming to Bristol was really exciting,” Kooper-Johnson tells The Athletic. “She has been on Dancing with the Stars (Maher finished as runner-up in that show in November) and she’s just so cool and inspiring. If she can be a catalyst for getting more people into women’s sports, then that’s amazing. She has that ability to bring people together.”

Maher takes a selfie with fans after making her debut for Bristol Bears (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Maher’s arrival in England was always going to be impactful.

Having helped the United States’ rugby union sevens women’s team dramatically win Olympic bronze on the game’s final play in Paris last summer, she has timed her move to the sport’s 15-a-side format, where the matches last over four times longer (80 minutes to 14), feature twice as many players on the pitch and games are generally more attritional, to perfection. This is a World Cup year and Maher is eyeing a place on the USA roster. The tournament kicks off with host nation England taking on the Americans on August 22.

Friends Lucy Parkinson, Elvira Berninger, Abby Bevan and Maria East had travelled 130 miles from Bournemouth on the English south coast for Sunday’s have-to-be-there moment. Rugby union team-mates for Ellingham & Ringwood RFC, they usually only attend international women’s fixtures.

“We love all the other players but she (Maher) was the instigator. We were 50/50, like, ‘Do we come just because of the Ilona Maher effect? Yeah, let’s enjoy the hype’,” Bevan tells The Athletic, while East added that the attention on Maher “can only be a good thing for rugby”.

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Chloe and Luke Glover are season-ticket holders for the Bears’ men’s team, so are regulars at Ashton Gate, but the couple had never watched a women’s game before being drawn in by ‘Maher fever’. “She has brought quite a lot of attention to it so we thought we would come and see what it is all about,” Luke says.

Queuing up near food trucks selling churros and barbecued pulled pork are Cathy and her 16-year-old daughter Jasmine, who herself plays rugby union. “She (Maher) has had a big impact on a lot of young girls starting and getting into the sport in general. It has been a big topic, Ilona joining,” Jasmine says. “There are a lot more people looking for teams to join around Bristol, and with her joining a lot more people have even just come here… It was a lot harder to get tickets this time.”

Dings Crusaders under-14s girls’ team did not need to worry about getting tickets, as many of their players were employed to retrieve any loose balls during Sunday’s match. Nellie MacDonald, 12, plays for Dings and feels Maher had made “a massive change to everything already”, and her mum, Sam, agrees, saying, “The amount of people that are here, you can already see it is bigger than before.”

Maher speaks with TNT Sports presenter Jenny Drummond after the match (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

The game was shown live on TNT Sports in the UK, and the league shared a pre-match social media post detailing its kick-off time in various time zones.

Whenever Maher’s face was beamed onto the stadium’s big screen, huge cheers erupted from the thousands gathered in the Dolman Stand and South Stand. The decibels rose when her name was read out before kick-off and, again, when she came on as a replacement during the second half.

Playing on the wing and wearing knee pads and her now-iconic matte red lipstick, Maher burst into a nerve-calming tackle within seconds. The American likes to run with ball in hand, but Gloucester-Hartpury turned up the heat and gave the home side little room to manoeuvre in a match the visitors won 40-17, scoring six tries in total.

Though Maher failed to get a touch of the ball during her time in the game, her introduction lifted the crowd and the team — Bristol scored their third and final try four minutes after she was introduced.

Finally, an hour and 11 minutes after first beginning her lap of fan selfies following the final whistle, Maher sat down for her own post-match press conference.

“I just try to be as equal as possible, because they’re going to do so much for me as maybe I’m doing for them,” Maher said. “They bought a seat and that seat is going to lead to hopefully some more seats. Fans are the revenue we need to bring in to make this league bigger. So it’s almost, I feel, like my duty. They’re doing so much so I want to do more for them.

“Some people came from America. I had some people say they came to this game from Washington, D.C. to watch… I put those (social media) videos out there for them. I want them to feel confident and love themselves and play the sport and understand what the body is capable of. It’s always just really cool that they’re out there and they stay out there.”

Maher, humble yet radiating confidence, takes ownership of the empire she has created, something she has achieved without necessarily being the best player in women’s rugby.

“It’s cool to be the face of a sport that isn’t thought of as a women’s sport,” she said. “It’s a men’s sport. So to be the face of it and also the impact I’m having is felt across both men’s and women’s (rugby), I’ve had some of the best men’s players in the world be like, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing’ because I think everyone sees value in it. And if one rises, we all rise.

“I’m really proud of what I’ve done and the impact I’ve had on social media, not just in a rugby sense, in a body-positivity sense, the way people are treating themselves. So I’m proud. I think my family is 10-times prouder,” Maher added, with her sister, Olivia, who has moved to England with her, smiling from the back of the room. “And I love what I’m doing.”

Millions of people do.

(Top photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Culture

Test Your Knowledge of International Detective Fiction

Published

17 hours ago

January 7, 2025

Press Room

Test Your Knowledge of International Detective Fiction

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights international detective characters cracking cases in their home cities. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading.