Text| Item type | Current library | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Loan | Moylish Library Fiction Collection | 823 DES (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 39002100665992 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A wonderful novel in two parts, moving from the heart of a close-knit Indian household, with its restrictions and prejudices, its noisy warmth and sensual appreciation of food, to the cool centre of an American family, with its freedom and strangely self-denying attitudes to eating. In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. Or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Her Indian family is difficult, demanding but mostly, good-hearted. Despite her disappointments, Uma comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, like her sister's, or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. And in America, where young Arun goes as a student, men in the suburbs char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terrifying to the young Indian adolescent far from home...
Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, 1999.
Author notes provided by Syndetics
Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, India, in 1937 of Indian and German parentage. Her works focus on relationships and family life in India, particularly the problems of women in Indian society. She has written for both adults and children, winning the Winifred Holtby Prize from the Royal Society of Literature for Fire on the Mountain (1977) and the Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction for her novel The Village by the Sea (1982). Among her numerous other honors is a Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library in 1993.Desai came to America in 1987. She has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, and Smithe College. Desai is currently Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at MIT.
(Bowker Author Biography)